The World Magazine blog (linked below) tells a story that is pretty scary:
Swedish pastor sentenced to one month’s jail for offending homosexuals
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”.
I have long thought that the future of the Church in this country may move towards some level of persecution. Not real persecution – talk to people in Burman or Sudan about real persecution – but some level of resistance. I think it is not unlikely that churches will lose their tax-exempt status, for example, for preaching against homosexuality or refusing to perform gay marriages.
Could that story out of Sweden portend things to come here?