Authored by Kevin Stocklin via The Epoch Times(emphasis ours),
Europeans who face criminal charges for what they said or wrote warned that Europe’s speech laws can silence Americans as well, regardless of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment protections.
While testifying before the House Judiciary Committee last week,Paivi Rasanen, a member of parliament in Finland, recounted how she has been prosecuted since 2021 for quoting Bible versesto church members and on social media that questioned her church’s participation in a Gay Pride march. Although she was acquitted, first by a local district court and then by an appellate court, prosecutors appealed the decision to Finland’s supreme court, where the case currently sits.
“My prosecution shows how quickly democratic societies can abandon free expression when the state decides which beliefs are acceptable,” Rasanen told The Epoch Times.
“I never imagined that quoting the Bible in a Twitter post would lead to years of criminal charges, yet this is now the reality in Europe,” she said. “Americans should be concerned because once censorship is normalized, it never stays confined to one country.”
The trend among Western countries to restrict religious speech has spread beyond Europe, with the Canadian government currently advancing a bill that would remove a religious exemption from “hate speech” laws in the country’sCriminal Code. Similarly, newly proposed legislation in Queensland, Australia, would criminalize certain symbols and phrases, with penalties of up to two years in prison.
While speaking before Congress, Rasanen was joined by Graham Linehan, an Irish writer and comedian who was arrested upon traveling through Heathrow Airport in 2025 for statements he had made in America on transgender issues.
“For a decade, the British police have harassed me for expressing views that the majority of the public share,” Linehan stated. “We have simply been punished for objecting to fashionable yet incoherent orthodoxies.”
Their testimony was underscored by the release of a Feb. 3 House report titled “The Foreign Censorship Threat,” which charged that “The European Commission, in a comprehensive decade-long effort, has successfully pressured social media platforms to change their global content moderation rules, thereby directly infringing on Americans’ online speech in the United States.”
More specifically, the report states that “though ostensibly meant to combat ‘misinformation’ and ‘hate speech,’ nonpublic documents produced to the Committee show that for the last 10 years,the European Commission has directly pressured platforms to censor lawful, political speech in the European Union and abroad.”
Source: ZeroHedge News
