Names and numbers

The past week has proven once again why I still love to live in Finland.

Last Friday, just over half of the Finnish parliament (52%) decided to vote in favour of gender-neutral marriage. It was big news for a day and rainbow flags were waved on the steps of the parliament building in celebration. This slim majority decision shows that the democratic process works in Finland and that minorities can have rights too.

Unfortunately, the Archbishop of the Lutheran church may have got a little carried away during all the merriment. He is a modern theologian and, in keeping with the times, used his Facebook account to inform the world that he thought the parliament’s decision was a wonderful thing. This led to 12,000 people resigning from the church in protest over the weekend. You couldn't make it up!

Although this reaction from a disgruntled congregation may appear as a mass exodus of biblical proportions, we should remember that the church has well over 4 million members (75 % of the Finnish population, in fact). Percentage-wise, that means that only about 0.3% of the church population was actually against the idea of same sex marriage. They were such a small minority that they were deemed expendable for the sake of the 99.7% who had another opinion.

I love statistics, because they help me to quickly make some kind of sense of the world I live in. The only thing I try to keep in mind, however, is to question the source as, more often than not, something quoted online has very little substance when examined in detail. This recent gender-neutral marriage vote, for example, is a good example of this. In my opinion, surely it would have been worth knowing how much of the Finnish population is actually gay before putting everyone through the trauma of change.

Unfortunately, I could not find any official statistics to help answer this rather important detail.  However, I did discover that some Gallup polls put the figure for homosexuality in the USA as high as 10%. But then the question arose about what it is that actually classifies people as gay. 

Is being gay a lifestyle choice, do you have to remain gay permanently to be considered gay or is there actually a gay gene? Scientific research is extremely vague on this last part, although it appears to tentatively hint that there is no conclusive evidence that there is a genetic disposition towards homosexuality, despite recent unpublished reports to the contrary. 

And so my conclusion, concerning that vote in Finland last week, is that it has brought a new right to an as yet unknown minority. Let’s hope that this minority actually turns out to be larger than the 0.3% minority who had to leave their church in protest in the first place.

One week later and now we are about to celebrate Finnish Independence Day (6^th December). I always smile when I hear the name as I think Finnish National Day would be a far more appropriate term to use;  after all Finland has been a full-standing member of the EU since 1995. 

Unlike national days elsewhere, the Finnish occasion is actually a somber one, more in line with an Armistice Day than a party. 

I believe that the most bizarre tradition on the day is the president’s party. Every year about 2000 lucky guests (0.04% of the population BTW) will have the right to shake the president’s hand while the rest of the country watches on television (all funded by the tax payer, I might add).  The uninvited masses then take enormous pleasure in comparing and criticizing the dresses of the ladies being presented. You couldn't make it up!

I wish you all a nice weekend of celebration however and with whomever you choose.