Has a European democracy really reached the point where quoting scripture can get you turned away at the border? The case of Päivi Räsänen suggests the answer is yes, and the implications should chill anyone who still believes free speech includes the freedom to articulate unfashionable religious belief.
Räsänen, a sitting Finnish MP and former interior minister, applied for the electronic travel authorisation now required for visa-free entry to the UK. It sailed through on 17 June. Thirteen days later it was cancelled with the curt explanation that the information she had supplied rendered her ineligible. That information was her recent Finnish Supreme Court conviction.
On 26 March the court split three to two and found her guilty of hate speech for a 2004 church pamphlet setting out biblical views on marriage and sexuality. The punishment: an €1,800 fine. Lower courts had twice acquitted her. She is appealing to the European Court of Human Rights, arguing that the decision paid insufficient regard to the guarantees of speech and religion in the European Convention. Yet Britain, which once prided itself on offering refuge to dissenters, now treats the mere fact of that conviction as sufficient to bar her transit.
The practical consequences were immediate. Returning from a conference in California, Räsänen scrapped plans to pass through Heathrow and rerouted via Dallas. Future visits to Northern Ireland, including an event on 17 August and the Bangor Worldwide Missionary Convention, hang in the balance. She has written to the Home Office and appealed directly to the home secretary. Her husband, incidentally, was allowed in without difficulty.
The canceled ETA already impacts me in other ways. Last week, returning from a conference in California, I scrapped plans to transit through Heathrow, choosing instead to fly via Dallas in order to avoid any problems passing through the U.K.
Her own words capture the quiet bureaucratic brutality of it. First came the positive answer on 17 June. Then, on 30 June, the "shocking message" from GOV.UK announcing cancellation. She describes the ruling as not merely an administrative inconvenience but a restriction on freedom of expression that spreads uncertainty, confusion and fear about where exactly the line now lies between lawful and prohibited speech.
Observe the exquisite irony. The same political class that lectures the world on diversity and inclusion recoils from a Finnish politician whose offence consists of having expressed, in a church pamphlet two decades ago, the historic Christian understanding of human sexuality. Western civilisation was built on precisely those foundations. Yet today they are treated as a species of thoughtcrime, potent enough to trigger border controls. The pamphlet did not call for violence. It did not incite hatred. It simply declined to bend biblical anthropology to contemporary taste.
