Stephen Pollard today on the EU Constitution:

Europe is not alone in such divides, of course. The religious fundamentalists who exercise such influence in some US states view the East and West coasts as cesspits of vice. But there is a critical difference. In the US, the people themselves are able to decide how and when their own morality should be applied in government.
If the proposed EU constitution is adopted, it will not matter what Mr Buttiglione, or anyone else, thinks. Most areas of morality and fundamental policy would no longer be amenable to democratic decision making; they are dictated in the text of the constitution. US states will be freer than EU member states to legislate as their populations see fit. US states can decide, for example, whether to have the death penalty. The new EU constitution says: “No one shall be condemned to the death penalty, or executed.”
Even under existing arrangements, the demand within the EU is that sovereign nations submit themselves to intellectual and political uniformity. The Buttiglione affair shows that the drive within the EU is indeed towards ever closer union.
A union, that is, which is not merely political and economic but something far more fundamental: intellectual, religious and moral. On Thursday’s Question Time on BBC1, Peter Tatchell said that a man with Mr Buttiglione’s beliefs could not, “by any reasonable democratic standards”, be a Commissioner. A more inverted statement of the truth would be hard to imagine. Neither I nor Mr Tatchell might care for Mr Buttiglione’s views but public opinion in many parts of the EU back them fully. It is the attempt to exclude such views from acceptable public discourse that is anti-democratic.

There is, as always, only one response possible. Ceterum censeo Unionem Europaeam esse delendam