Wednesday, December 21, 2005

EU Culture Wars


The battles inside Brussels and Strasburg are not just limited to budgets and structural funds (logo: League of Polish Families)).

An organization called Catholics for Free Choice has written to the EU Commission saying they are outraged at a poster exhibition put up last month in the European parliament by the League of Polish Families. Josep Borrell writes in a letter to the Commission’s President:

As religious, women’s rights and human rights leaders, we are outraged that an exhibition in the European Parliament included posters comparing abortion with the Shoah and request that the Parliament publicly dissociates itself from the exhibition.

We are saddened that MEPs representing European citizens from Poland would seek to condemn women who make the complex moral decision to terminate an unwanted pregnancy by suggesting they are mass murderers.

We feel deeply concerned that the political culture in the European Parliament will be degraded if the leadership of the Parliament and the majority of MEPs do not stand up to defend the values and principles of the EU from attacks by religious extremists.

The exhibition featured images of children in concentration camps under captions referring to abortion. Liberals tried to rip the posters down and a tussle broke out between MEPs.

All very ugly. But some smell a plot. A communist plot. Lifesite.net – a ‘pro-family, pro-life’ group writes:

The poster that caused the furor was displayed by a group of Euro-skeptics, MEP’s who have formed a coalition against the leftist extremism that they perceive as a threat to the sovereignty of the nations making up the EU. The intensity of the reaction to the poster appears to indicate that the parties who have controlled the EU are worried about cracks in their power.

LifeSiteNews.com was unable to reach representatives of the Polish family and pro-life organizations, but the existence of a movement against European Union leftist extremism is a growing phenomenon. Earlier this month, LifeSiteNews.com reported that with the election of the new leader of Britain’s Tory party, David Cameron, a coalition of MEP’s is finding strength to resist EU social engineering pressure.

Blimey! UK politician that nobody had ever heard of until this year - and most of you still won’t know who he is even now - is going to save Europe from a extremist lefty take-over! I bet that’s news to the ideology-lite, policy-lite Mr Cameron.

And who are these leftist extremists? Peter Mandelson?

I should point out that the League of Polish Families - the party that organised the exhibition - is so rightwing loony that even the not-quite-so-loony, but equally euroskeptic British celeb politician Robert Kilroy-Silk refused to join the same EU Parliament club as them because he thought they were 'right wing nutters'.

The whole thing goes to show that there is now a culture war going on within the EU. And it’s the conservatives who are on the attack. One of their tactics could be to try and revive a shortened EU Constitution and try and roll back the secular 'supra-state' that way. Brussels might issue a statement proclaiming the usual ‘tolerance to everything but intolerance’ line – which says nothing at all, really.

The old EU consensus, about pretty much anything, has gone for good.

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