(Daily Signal)—When Päivi Räsänen, a Christian member of Finland’s Parliament who was convicted of “hate speech” for a pamphlet citing the Bible, booked flights with a layover in London, the United Kingdom rejected her visa application.
Räsänen told the Daily Signal in an interview Thursday that the U.K. initially approved her application, but days before her flight, the government notified her it had been canceled.
The rules for Electronic Travel Authorization state that entry clearance or permission “must be refused” when an applicant “has committed a criminal offence, or offences, which caused serious harm.”
Räsänen told the Daily Signal that the crime of which she had been convicted “is in a section of war crimes and crimes against humanity.” She had booked tickets from the U.S. back to Helsinki, Finland’s capital city, with a layover in London.
The Finnish member of Parliament says she is a member of the Finnish Parliament’s “friendship group” with the UK Parliament. In August, she plans to speak in Northern Ireland at a conference about freedom of speech.
‘Hate Speech’ Charges for a Bible Verse Tweet
Räsänen’s case dates back to 2019, when she criticized the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland for supporting an LGBTQ+ Pride event.
“How does the doctrine of the church, the Bible, fit together with the fact that shame and sin are raised as a matter of ‘pride’?” she tweeted.
Her tweet included a photo of the 2004 pamphlet titled “As Man and Woman He Created Them,” explaining the Bible’s position on sexuality and marriage. The photo cites Romans 1:24-27, which reads, “women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones” and “men committed shameful acts with other men.”
Prosecutors charged her with “hate speech.” The Helsinki District Court acquitted her in March 2022, and the appeals court similarly acquitted her in November 2023, but prosecutors kept appealing.
The prosecution claimed that the court failed to “fully perceive and understand” the “degrading and dehumanizing” message against “homosexuals.”
“In order to protect the dignity and equality of homosexuals, it is necessary to exclude Räsänen’s statements from freedom of expression by interpreting them as punishable hate speech directed at them [homosexuals],” the prosecution wrote.
Convicted of ‘Hate Speech’
In March, Finland’s Supreme Court upheld the acquittal for the Bible verse tweet, but a 3-2 majority convicted her, along with Lutheran Bishop Juhana Pohjola, of hate speech for expressing their beliefs on Christianity and sexuality in the 2004 church pamphlet. The two Finns are appealing the decision at the European Court of Human Rights, represented by Alliance Defending Freedom International.
“It is about, I’d say, a very classical Christian view of marriage and gender,” Räsänen told the Daily Signal.
The pamphlet said that “homosexuality is a deviation from the original, God-created sexuality.”
“The Supreme Court said that it is illegal to say that,” Räsänen recalled. “You should say that it is a normal variation, not a deviation.”
“I understand that they may argue against my views,” the Christian legislator said. “Now, many people in Finland are afraid because they do not know what is legal and what is illegal to say.”
She noted that “thousands of pastors” have delivered sermons with such statements, and that similar language appears in the Finnish translation of the Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church. “I’m sure that the prosecutor will not attack or target the Roman Catholic Church,” she said.
The LGBTQ group SETA celebrated Räsänen’s conviction, and expressed hope that it would lead to more reporting of “hate speech against rainbow people,” that prosecutors would bring more charges, and that they would be taken seriously in court.
“There are people who are afraid of what would happen to them,” the Christian legislator told the Daily Signal. She said SETA pledged to “screen different kinds of writings and find similar views.”
When asked whether prosecutors have brought similar charges against other Christians, she said, “Not yet.”
Räsänen, who has spent 31 years in Parliament, plans to run for reelection next year. It will be her first race as a “convicted criminal.”
‘Hostility’ to Christianity
She blamed “hostility” to Christianity and a misunderstanding of sin for the prosecution against her.
“They have argued that if you say that homosexual relationships are sinful, then you think that these people are inferior to other people, even though I have said very clearly that all people are equal, we all are created as the image of God,” the Christian legislator said.
“I have said it many times in court that I am also a sinner,” Räsänen explained. “We are all sinners, and we are in need of grace in Jesus, in his atonement on the cross.”
She argued that the “post-Christian West” has neglected the Christian faith, and forgotten the “core message of the Bible.”
While it is no picnic to face criminal charges for her faith, the legislator said the prosecution has given her an opportunity to share the gospel.
She recalled a message from a young man last year. When he heard about Räsänen’s case in 2019, he identified as an atheist and homosexual, and was angry with her. When he reached out back then, she engaged with him, and shared the gospel.
“He said that after his conversation with me, he has found Christ, and he has found a way to eternal life,” the legislator recalled.
“I understood that this is not in vain,” she said. “It is not in vain to defend these freedoms. It is not in vain to share the message of the Bible.”
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
