Prison for preaching
Alarming to see this report in a cyber-bulletin called Ecumenical News International for the month of July 2004:
Stockholm (ENI). A Swedish court has sentenced a pastor belonging to the Pentecostal movement in Sweden, Ake Green, to a month in prison, under a law against incitement, after he was found guilty of having offended homosexuals in a sermon. Soren Andersson, the president of the Swedish federation for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights (RFSL), said on hearing the sentence that religious freedom could never be used as a reason to offend people. “Therefore,” he told journalists, “I cannot regard the sentence as an act of interference with freedom of religion.” During a sermon in 2003, Green described homosexuality as “abnormal, a horrible cancerous tumour in the body of society”.
Lutheranism was the state church in Sweden until quite recently. Now it seems that anyone who practices true Lutheranism too publicly is in danger of imprisonment.