What is being called Europe’s ‘soft totalitarianism’ is on the march – and it is not restricted to Europe. European Union law, which came into effect a few days ago, will force recognition of gay union on member states whose traditional, religious social ethic means they are opposed to it.

The law orders members (including those which have rejected calls for such unions) to ‘facilitate’ homosexual partners who have ‘married’ in their home countries and want to travel to or live in EU nations which don’t recognise such unions.

Three EU countries, the Netherlands, Belgium and Spain have permitted ‘gay marriage’. Britain, Germany and a number of other countries have introduced gay civil unions. Other states, however, such as Poland, Italy and Malta have resisted such moves and the EU’s coercive policy is directed at them.

It is astounding that Europe is not merely systematically unravelling the moral settlement at the heart of western civilisation but is using such coercion to do so, riding roughshod over the democratic rights of individual countries to pass laws in accordance with their own religious and moral beliefs and values. It is a clear illustration of the totalitarian impulse at the heart of not just the EU project but the ‘progressive’ universalism which the EU project embodies: the belief that individual nations have no right to express their known particular values through their own laws, because laws and values rooted in the particular are by nature exclusive and discriminatory; that the only legitimate laws and values must be universal and supranational; and that because these are universal, they are by definition unchallengeable and therefore any person or state who defies them must be guilty of prejudice and punished accordingly. This is cultural totalitarianism: a supranational religion of nihilism that is now to be ruthlessly enforced by the Savonarolas of secularism.

And it is not confined to Europe. As Maggie Gallagher reports in the Weekly Standard, the same ‘liberal’ intolerance has now claimed a particularly sad casualty. The Catholic Charities of Boston, one of America’s oldest adoption agencies, has now been forced to shut down because of its opposition to same-sex adoption.

Massachusetts law prohibits ‘orientation discrimination’. In November 2003, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court gave the green light to ‘gay marriage’, opposition to which instantly became classifiable as a legally stamped prejudice. The outcome of that was that the moral and religious beliefs of the Catholic church came into direct conflict with state-mandated nihilistic secularism.

To operate in Massachusetts, an adoption agency must be licensed by the state. And to get a license, an agency must pledge to obey state laws barring discrimination--including the decade-old ban on orientation discrimination. With the legalization of gay marriage in the state, discrimination against same-sex couples would be outlawed, too.

Cardinal O'Malley asked Governor Mitt Romney for a religious exemption from the ban on orientation discrimination. Governor Romney reluctantly responded that he lacked legal authority to grant one unilaterally, by executive order. So the governor and archbishop turned to the state legislature, requesting a conscience exemption that would allow Catholic Charities to continue to help kids in a manner consistent with Catholic teaching. To date, not a single other Massachusetts political leader appears willing to consider even the narrowest religious exemption.

The result is the loss of a charity doing invaluable and necessary work in finding adoptive families for hard-to-place children. It also illustrates the deep illiberalism of a world-view which presents itself as the acme of liberal tolerance, and exposes as false the argument used over and over again to support the gay rights agenda, that this merely serves the principle of equality and hurts no-one else in doing so. Wrong. It is denying Catholic moral teaching the right to express itself. It is a direct assault in those values. It is not liberal, it is not progressive, it is not serving equality. It is instead enforcing one value system over another, and as such is a direct assault on the bedrock of our freedoms and our society.