Why Europe Doesn't Get Us.

BigDog sent me some excellent links. This is one of them from The American Thinker.

It lays out in a readable fashion why we are so different from Europe. It focuses on one major difference-The death penalty. I was surprised to learn this:

"Polls in the US reveal that national support for the death penalty remains consistently high at around 70%, a view confirmed by a May Gallup Poll. The poll highlighted cross-party priorities on a number of key moral policy issues with the strongest agreement between the parties coming on the use of the death penalty. Republicans (82%) and Democrats (63%) concur on the "moral acceptability" of its use. Not a finding that Europeans might expect from a nation it often sees as the "fifty-fifty (Left v Right) nation."

I had no idea the majority of Democrats supported the death penalty.

Now, I am against the death penalty, but for purely religious reasons. From a democratic viewpoint I understand why it is legal and why people desire it. The article describes how European countries came to end the death penalty:

"There is barely a country in Europe where the death penalty was abolished in response to public opinion rather than in spite of it."

In other words, we keep the death penalty because "the people" demand that we do. We are a nation that responds to the wants of the people, a representative government. Whereas European leaders have a tendency to ignore the will of the people and pass their own politically correct laws.

But if anything illustrates the difference between us and our European friends, it is this:

"The EU technocrats responsible for drafting the EU Constitution specifically have made a point of obfuscating the formative role of its Judeo-Christian worldview in the development of West civilizationtion and values. But where the EU has chosen the path of historic amnesia and writing off remembrance of its formative Judeo-Christian heritage in its (thus far discredited) constitution, the American founding fathers chose to write the "remembrance" into theirs."