The biggest news of the last several days for Christians, for sure, is the conviction of Dr. Päivi Räsänen on charges that she had basically violated human rights inciting hatred by identifying homosexuality as a developmental disorder in a published pamphlet.

Now, Dr. Päivi Räsänen is a physician. She’s also a very longtime member of Parliament, an MP there in Finland. She’s also been a government minister and she’s been at the center of controversy now for several years. It does appear that she and defense counsel were surprised at the way this eventually went down, but let’s just review what in the world we’re talking about. We’re talking about a Lutheran, a doctor, we’re talking about a member of the government at times and an ongoing member of parliament.

Dr. Päivi Räsänen had written a pamphlet in which she said that homosexuality was rightly understood as a developmental disorder. That was a long time ago. She republished the pamphlet and at a certain point in public discussions, she cited the pamphlet, even posting it on social media.

The government’s chief prosecutor went at the member of parliament even as similar charges were filed against a Lutheran bishop in Finland. And by the way, there are two Lutheran denominations that effectively are recognized as state established churches there in Finland, but a bishop of the church, and in this case, a minister of government or a foreign minister and current member of parliament has been convicted under Finland’s war crimes and crimes against humanity law and included in the provisions of that law is spreading “an expression of opinion or another message where a certain group is threatened, defamed, or insulted on the basis of its skin color, race, birth status, national or ethnic origin, religion, or belief, sexual orientation or disability or a comparable basis.”

Now, here’s what’s really, really important. Finland also states, and insists, that it affirms religious liberty, but of course it doesn’t. And in this case, you have an argument that was made by a government official who is also, let’s just state the obvious, a citizen and is a member of a Lutheran church, she made the argument about homosexuality being, well, she said in this case, a developmental disorder, but she’s referring to it clearly also in a biblical context, and now she’s been convicted of a crime under Finland’s war crimes and crimes against humanity law.

The chief prosecutor there had pressed the case even as one lower court found her not guilty and a second court found her not guilty. Now, by the way, immediately you recognize a difference in the Finnish and the American systems of justice because in the United States, a prosecutor could not continue to seek these cases, these charges, against an individual found not guilty at a court level. You can’t then go to a higher court and try the case all over again, but in Finland you can. That’s exactly what the prosecutor did.

An American organization you hear about often on The Briefing, the Alliance Defending Freedom defended Päivi Räsänen during the trials, asserting her right to free speech and religious liberty, and again, both supposedly protected under Finland’s law and constitution. It’s also important to know that Päivi Räsänen is the mother of five children and she’s the grandmother of 12 grandchildren. Her Christian faith is “a large part of her life, including inspiring her to hold elected office.” That according to the Alliance Defending Freedom.

The ADF went right at the Finnish system of government, accusing Finnish officials of “blatantly attacking free speech.” Even as the nation, of course, declares itself committed to protect free expression and the right to “express, disseminate, and receive information, opinions, and other communications without prior prevention by anyone.” Until you do it and then you’re arrested.

In response to her conviction, Dr. Räsänen said, “I cannot accept that voicing my religious beliefs could mean imprisonment. I do not consider myself guilty of threatening, slandering, or insulting anyone. My statements were all based on the Bible’s teachings on marriage and sexuality. I will defend my right to confess my faith so that no one else would be deprived of their right to freedom of religion and speech.”

It is interesting that a current government minister, Leena Meri, who is Finland’s minister of justice, she said that Finland’s law in this case is, “Not sufficiently precise and especially not predictable as required by the principle of legality in the criminal code.” That’s legalese, but here you do have the minister of justice in Finland saying it shouldn’t have turned out this way. Something is wrong with this process. She went on to say something that should be obvious by now, “It is very difficult for people to know what is prohibited and what is permitted.” Now let me just state that if that is the case, if it’s true, that your legal situation is one in which it’s very difficult for people to know what is prohibited and what is permitted when it comes to religious liberty and free speech here’s a memo for you, you don’t have religious liberty and you don’t have free speech. 

I want to go back to the list of protected classes under Finland’s war crimes and crimes against humanity law. Again, it includes any expression of opinion or another message where a certain group is threatened, defamed, or insulted. And again, here are the categories, “race, skin color, birth status, national ethnic origin, religion or belief, sexual orientation or disability or a comparable basis.” I want you to notice something. Religious belief or religion here is put on the same plane as sexual orientation or for that matter, this wide open category of a comparable basis. This really is a huge problem. And one of the things we need to know is that there are those in the United States who would seek to have the very same kind of system put in place here. It’s also important for us to recognize that when it comes to this kind of speech and this kind of attempted control of speech and advocacy, this is exactly the direction that many of America’s most prestigious institutions have been heading now for a number of years.

And there is considerable political and legal blow back right now, primarily coming from the Trump administration, and it is making a difference, but those who are pushing this agenda are not going to stop pushing this agenda. And what we already see now in Finland is that when you have a collision, and this is something we just need to know, when there is an inevitable collision between religious liberty and the new synthetic sexual liberties, in most situations and a progressivist culture, it is the sexual liberties that win and religious liberty that must go. That’s the logic prevailing in so many cultures.

I want to remind Americans that this logic is a lot closer than you might think. Remember Beto O’Rourke, of course, having run for office there in the state of Texas and eventually actually running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, back in 2019 in a lead up to that event, the CNN Equality Town Hall was held Don Lemon, who was then a CNN anchor, needless to say on these issues, he’s back in the headlines, but he was then a CNN anchor. He asked, then former Congressman Beto O’Rourke, this question, “Do you think religious institutions like colleges, churches, charities, should they lose their tax-exempt status if they oppose same sex marriage?” The former US Congressman who was then running for the Democratic presidential nomination said, “Yes.” He received loud applause from the audience.

He went on to state, these are his words now, “There can be no reward, no benefit, no tax break for anyone or any institution, any organization in America that denies the full human rights and the full civil rights of every single one of us.” So in other words, so much for religious liberty because he actually mentions any organization, any institution, and the context was actually speaking about Christians, explicitly Christian colleges and churches and tax-exempt status. So you can see there are those who want to pick up this sword and use this sword against Christians in the United States in terms of religious liberty as well.

I would also point to Chai Feldblum, who has actually served on the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, very prominent gay rights attorney. And back in 2005, so we’re now talking about more than 20 years ago, she made the argument that identity liberty would come into collision with religious liberty, and identity liberty here means sexual identity, and then she said that the time would come inevitably, that’s her word. She said, “We would face an inevitable choice between liberties and it would come into play.”

She then went on to say clearly, “In making that choice, I believe society must come down on the side of protecting the identity and liberty of LGBT people.” So religious liberty just has to give way. So as much as we might think this is something that is just happening in Finland, I assure you the logic is very present here in the United States as well. Over the weekend, Päivi Räsänen, Dr. Räsänen, wrote an essay that was published at National Review entitled My Criminal Conviction is a Terrible Blow to Free Speech in Europe. She says, “I have served in the Finnish Parliament for over 30 years, including as minister of the interior. I’m also a medical doctor and a proud grandmother.”

She goes on and says, she stated her Christian convictions on Twitter. She’d also written this booklet and then she went on to say that Finland’s highest court has confirmed her acquittal for the Tweet, but not for the other written document. She goes on to say, “I wrote the pamphlet years before the law under which I’ve been prosecuted was passed. In finding me guilty, the court acknowledged that the content in question did not incite violence or hatred, even so it ruled that expressing those views in that context was criminal.”

So again, remember, she wrote the document before, long before the law was even passed. That tells you how this works. “It’s evident that European hate speech laws are incompatible with free society,” she writes. “The criminalization of so called hate speech introduces rampant legal ambiguity, if at least are lawful in one setting, but punishable in another, how is any citizen to know where the line is drawn?” And then she goes on to say, “Ask yourself, what have you written over the years? A blog post, a comment, a paper for school, a pamphlet for your community. Under a standard like this, any peaceful expression could become the subject of a criminal prosecution.”

There’s a lot more to her quite excellent essay, by the way, in response to this conviction. She also says that she is planning to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights, I’ll just say that’s a pretty liberal group, so I’m not sure how that’s going to fare but this is very important and American Christians, Christians all over the world need to recognize the importance of this case. It could well turn out to be a landmark case. It should certainly awaken us all to the issues that are at stake.

There are those who would wish to shut down Christian witness, the Christian ability to even speak the truth about one of the most basic issues of all human morality, and that is how we are to relate to one another, what is the institution of marriage and what should be rightful and what is wrongful sexual expression. If indeed you can’t state the truth about these matters, there is no religious liberty.

But I want to turn to something a lot closer to home here in Louisville, Kentucky, because even as this case is from Finland, there were just in the last several days, two cases of a similar kind of issue right here in Louisville, Kentucky. And so one of them, I’m actually going to use the local newspaper here. The Courier Journal is the source on both of these, not exactly a conservative publication, so that’s why I am citing these two articles. Number one, the first headline, “Louisville to Pay $800,000 in Wedding Photographer Religious Freedom Case.” So Killian Baarlaer is the reporter here, “Louisville Metro government, that’s right here, where I sit right now, has agreed to pay $800,000 to cover attorney fees for a Louisville photographer who successfully claimed in a 2019 lawsuit that a city law violated her first amendment rights.”

“Christian nonprofit legal organization, Alliance Defending Freedom,” remember, by the way, this was the same organization that defended Dr. Päivi Räsänen there in Finland, so also here in this case in Louisville, “the ADF represented Chelsey Nelson in the case and announced the settlement in a March 24th news release.” Listen to this: “The settlement marks the end of the year’s long case, which commenced after Nelson, a wedding photographer and owner of Chelsey Nelson photography, claimed Louisville’s fairness ordinance infringed on her constitutional rights as a Christian because it could force her to take on same-sex wedding assignments against her religious beliefs.” Senior counsel at ADF, Brian Neidhardt said, “For almost six years, Louisville officials tried to do just that by threatening to force Chelsea to promote views about marriage that violated her religious beliefs. Louisville’s threats contradicted bedrock First Amendment principles, which leave decisions about what to say with the people, not the government. This settlement should teach Louisville that violating the US Constitution can be expensive.”

Well, yes, indeed. $800,000 here, but I have no confidence this won’t happen again and again and again. I’m thankful for ADF, I’m thankful for Chelsey Nelson taking a stand here. It’s going to have to be done again and again and again.

And as if to make that point, I want to come right back here to Louisville, Kentucky for a second article. Two days later, here’s the headline, “Ex Heine Brothers employee says she was fired for sharing Christian views.” This is a coffee company. Listen to this. “A former Heine Brothers Coffee employee claims she was fired for talking about her Christian beliefs at work after being asked about them by two coworkers according to a federal discrimination complaint filed March 24th. The complaint comes as other allegations,” I’m reading from the article here, “of religious discrimination received national attention, including accusations against an instructor at the University of Oklahoma who was removed after she gave a failing grade to a student who cited her religious beliefs and an essay about gender rights.”

By the way, I mentioned that case and that’s why I read it just as it’s written, but let’s just say the pronoun is a problem there. Then listen to this. “First Liberty Institute, a nonprofit legal organization focused on religious freedom and the law firm Sturgill Turner filed the charge of discrimination with the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on behalf of Paige Rogers, a sophomore at Boyce College in Louisville,” right here. “In the complaint, Rogers alleges she was fired from Heine Brothers in October 2025 after sharing her views on marriage and same-sex relationships with her fellow employees during a shift on October the 1st.”

It’s very interesting because what she’s saying here is that during a four-hour shift with two coworkers, she was pressed on her Christian beliefs once they found out she was a student at our college, and she was asked very pointed questions about her understanding of sexual morality, particularly as related to LGBTQ issues. She said,” I respectfully shared my belief that homosexuality is a sin, but that we are all sinners and it’s never our place to judge someone else.” We’re then told she received a notice of termination over text back in October the 13th of 2025.

It’s going to be very interesting to see how this goes. I’m mentioning it because it just tells us how fast and furiously these cases are coming, and this one happens to be one of our students and right here in Louisville, Kentucky. I think it’s just important we recognize that we are talking about events in Finland. We’re also talking about events in Louisville, and that means events very close to wherever you live, wherever you are.

All right. Well, looking at many of these issues, it’s important to see that over the weekend something happened and we at least ought to take note of, and this is the No Kings demonstrations. They took place, we are told in all 50 states in one way or another. There was something like 3000 of the events, at least according to some press reports, and some of them had multiple thousands of people. I’m not going to be able to state with specificity how many people were involved in these No Kings rallies, but the press coverage was massive. And you can understand why.

And it is because the No Kings rallies are directed towards the Trump administration in particular, and they’re coming from the political Left, and it’s a very wide assortment of interests that make up the political Left and just about all of them are visible in these protests. And people are saying they don’t have any other voice, they’re doing this in order to get public attention, to awaken the American people to problems. You had one organizer who said, “We’re going for the ongoing engagement of as much of the population as possible in civic work. We don’t think we’re going to get out of this mess unless we have a much bigger number of people in every place in the country collectively owning their home turf and building power.”

Now it’s not at all clear that that’s what happens, but it is clear that it draws attention. And in terms of American politics, we just need to recognize that attention is a very priceless commodity. If you can attract this much attention and if it looks like a big social movement, you will get a lot of press coverage, especially when the press loves basically your side of the story. And there’s just no question about the alliance of so many on the left on this. And so it has been very interesting. We were told they were going to be huge. And then at one point in about the middle of the week, it appeared they were trying to hedge their bets and say,” Well, they may not be that large, but there are going to be a lot of them in all 50 states.” And then they’re coming back and saying, “No, it was the biggest ever.”

I think it’s going to take some kind of honest auditing of the numbers before we actually know. And by that, I don’t mean a legal audit, I just mean it’s going to be interesting to see what people add up. But it’s nonetheless big, so in other words, as a conservative, I’m not going to deny that it’s big. I’m not going to deny that many of these crowds were massive. I’m simply going to say that what we should get out of this, what we should learn out of this, is that both sides in our increasingly clear political, moral and cultural divide understand the urgency of the issues. It takes urgency to get people out of their homes, especially in some cold places early in the morning, out on these demonstration lines, out in these protest marches.

I’m not going to deny there were a lot of people, it looked like multiple, multiple thousands in many places. And if even the tip of the iceberg of what’s claimed is true, it’s a lot of people. And in the United States, that’s a very significant development. If you can get those many people out on a Saturday involved in protests, there are a lot of people on your side. This should be a wake-up call to, let’s say listeners to The Briefing. We understand we are in a very interesting cultural moment and we fool ourselves if we think the middle right now in this culture is very large. I think increasingly what we see is the energy because of the status of the issues, the importance of the issues.

The fact is, of course, there are people in the middle because they’re not really thoughtful about many of these things, they don’t have any deep worldview commitment, but what’s really interesting is to know that on both the right and the left, among both progressivists or liberals on the one hand and conservatives, and in particular conservative Christians on the other hand, we are talking about a massive worldview divide. We’re talking about an incredible chasm that separates the two positions.

And because of the way the issues are falling out, and yes, President Trump is one of the reasons these issues are falling out the way they are. I mean, just consider the fact that his administration has offered an explicit limiting definition of gender. He said this in his inaugural address. He might as well have declared war on the entire LGBTQ array. Now, by the way, he doesn’t talk a lot about the other parts of that, but it’s a comprehensive argument. At least it has been. It’s going to be very interesting to see if it continues to be a comprehensive argument.

But the way the left works, they have to work on comprehensive arguments. You got to have a lot of letters in your sequence because everybody’s got to claim that you’re in a united front. And the sense that united front is not established on some kind of traditional basis like say Christianity, Christian moral teaching, or for that matter, a perpetuation of Western civilization, then guess what? You’re going to have a very interesting amalgam of people and interests, and that’s exactly what you saw on the streets in the No Kings rallies.

Again, it’s going to be very interesting to see what kind of final numbers are tabulated, but honesty should compel us to say this was a very significant number of people. And the issues that they were speaking to are very significant issues. And where there is a divide, it’s a very significant divide. Honesty serves both sides by making that point clear.

All right. Finally, for today, big headline that might introduce some people to a new issue of concern, and this would be deep fake porn, deep fake pornography. The reason we’re talking about it is because of major headlines just in recent days. USA Today headlines, “Students Sentenced in Pennsylvania Deep Fake Porn Case.” Two reporters at USA Today tell us, “A small community and elite private school was rocked after it came to light in May 2024 that two male students had created 347 explicit deep fake photos and videos of 60 girls.” Okay. So just to make the point, this is using computer imagery to create fake porn, but very believable, very explicit fake porn of very real girls in this school.

And the damage is really massive. We’re talking about many of these girls suffering a very great deal, and you can understand why, this was a devastating realization. There are two male students or former male students, at the center of this, “On March 25th, the two male, former Lancaster County Day School students were sentenced on felony counts of sexual abuse of children,” that means manufacturing child sexual abuse material “and criminal conspiracy to commit that offense.” It’s some big news. It’s making a lot of big news, it actually made the front page of USA Today and another story last Wednesday. And at least a part of this is also being driven by increasing fears that you have a combination here of this “deep fake porn” made possible in the digital revolution, and then the combination with artificial intelligence. This should be a warning to parents everywhere. Should be a warning to schools everywhere, to Christian leaders everywhere.

One of the things that Christians understand, if no one else understands it, is that every single technology will be used in a sinful way. Every single technology almost, you could say, ingeniously will be used in a nefarious evil, and we have to use this word sinful way. What you have in the digital revolution is the opportunity for even more widespread predatory pornographic behavior. And what is particularly chilling in all of this is the ability to use someone’s actual face, in this case, a young girl, an actual face, put on explicit pornography, and you are looking at something that is just incredibly comprehensively evil every way you look at it.

USA Today mentions the obvious in a subhead, “Schools, laws, awareness, lag behind AI evolution.” Well, yes. And by the way, that’s something else the biblical worldview reminds us of. It’s actually in Scripture itself, where in so many cases, and in the history of the Christian church, it’s the same thing, in the history of Western civilization, the same thing. You don’t have a law against something in most cases until it happens, which is to say that in some sense, particularly in the modern age with things happening so quickly, particularly with technology, the law is going to lag behind the reality.

You can’t actually expect the law to outlaw something that isn’t imaginable. It has to become a real threat, a real thing. It has to be legally defined and definable. I’m mentioning this in particular for Christians because I think many Christians don’t recognize how young some people are when they’re deeply involved in this, both as the perpetrators, the creators of this kind of porn, and also as the victims. And you’re talking about two teenage boys here. And by the way, they were tried, they eventually pleaded guilty as minors as juveniles so that they would avoid the more significant prosecutorial threat and then penalties that would fall upon them if they were tried as adults.

A couple of other chilling things I just want to draw your attention to. As I said, the law lags behind. Here’s how USA Today puts it. “As artificial intelligence platforms evolve, the prevalence of nudity applications meant to remove someone’s clothing is growing in tandem. School policies, legal recourse, and awareness lag far behind, experts say.” Okay, this is one of the cases in which I’m going to say whoever the experts are, they are certainly right, and you don’t have to be an expert to figure that out.

The second big issue here is of equal concern, and that is the fact that so much of it is not just sexually explicit and pornographic, it is predatory, and the victims of so much of this are underage girls. I mean, again, it would be horrifying enough if we were talking about adults, but in this case, and by the way, that should be fully a crime and fully prosecuted and women need to be fully protected, and of course, in a fallen world, just about anyone under some circumstance, but of course the younger or more vulnerable could well be the victim of something like this.

So we just need to be aware of this. Christian parents need to be aware of it. Christian grandparents need to be aware of it. Christian pastors, youth leaders and others, all Christians need to be aware of this, and we need to understand that every technology is almost immediately corrupted into sinful purposes, and that’s true whether the technology is a knife or a digital imaging. It is also very, very interesting to see an explicit acknowledgement here that the law always lags behind innovation in criminality. On this issue, the law had better catch up at least as much as it can, and fast.