Do we want to be like Europe?
Europe is the first large and powerful civilization attempting to base itself on a pervasive secularism. The American tradition is not secularism, but religious liberty -- in the God-given right of every human being to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. European elites, by contrast, tend to see religious belief as a mere senseless passion, as an essentially irrational drive that may be permitted expression but must also be constrained.
In European eyes, religion is messy and, if not disciplined, gets in the way of the quiet, orderly consuming society that has become the European ideal.
Thus, in an extraordinary move early in April, the EU Parliament voted 360 to 227 to remove certain exemptions from discrimination law for "organizations based on religion and belief." Oh yes, this is a nonbinding directive. And the peculiar EU constitution ensures that any new restrictions on religious practice must pass muster with the religious outliers in the emerging secularist EU civilization: Poland, Ireland and Malta. Thank God for Malta. But this lopsided EU Parliament vote is telling of where the culture of the EU is headed and where the best minds of Europe want that civilization to go.
As ideals go, the emerging European civilization is noteworthy for its essential pacifism -- its lack of blood-thirstiness. Nobody will be martyred in Europe for their religious beliefs anymore; they will merely be regulated, fined, controlled, repressed and marginalized in a firm, but good-humored fashion.
Except that Europe, even more than America (where abortion still troubles the conscience), is a civilization built on human sacrifice.
Exhibit A: In the formerly Great Britain, a government body called the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) is set to consider calmly and rationally, as if it were an idea a civilized person (or people) can entertain: Should Britons create embryos -- their own unborn children -- for the purpose of providing spare body parts for the parents?
Eating our own young? Well, there are ethical pros and cons, British experts say. The embryo-eaters (or their advocates) ponder.
This week Harvard professor Mary Ann Glendon, a former ambassador to the Vatican decided she could not in good conscience appear alongside President Obama as Notre Dame confers an honorary degree on our president.
The Catholic bishops, she points out, have expressly respected the freedom of Catholic universities to engage in debate and dialogue with whomever they choose. They have asked only one thing of Notre Dame and other Catholic universities: that they do not confer honors on people who support the killing of the unborn.
"That request, which in no way seeks to control or interfere with an institution's freedom to invite and engage in serious debate with whomever it wishes, seems to me so reasonable that I am at a loss to understand why a Catholic university should disrespect it," she wrote in a letter to the Rev. John Jenkins, Notre Dame's president.
Let me make a prediction: This is no accident. President Obama is going to Notre Dame on May 17 with a mission: to wrest the next generation of Catholics away from their faith, to soothe into silence our nation's troubled consciences and to explain how other issues are more important than the 50 million unwanted children stripped of the most basic civil right of all.
Will he succeed? Will America become more like Europe? Catholics in this, as in so much else, are the swing vote.