HONESTY HAS been doubly dishonoured in the EU this week. On Wednesday, two years after suspending Marta Andreasen, the EU’s chief accountant, the Prodi Commission declared her finally dismissed. Her crime? She had refused to sign off on the Commission accounts because what passes for book-keeping in Brussels is a thieves’ licence. Worse, when she hit a brick wall inside the Commission, she went public.

Here, you might have thought, was a rank injustice, a chance for MEPs to show that they are serious about accountability. Forget it; MEPs are busy just now defending Europe against the “threat” of a commissioner who has dared to be honest about his unfashionably conservative religious convictions.

Rocco Buttiglione, the Italian allocated the justice and home affairs portfolio in the incoming Commission, is a thoughtful Christian Democrat who has served with distinction as Italy’s Minister for EU affairs. His appointment was approved by the European Parliament’s legal committee, but he fell foul of its civil liberties committee — principally for saying that he considers homosexuality to be a sin. No matter that he insisted that “the rights of homosexuals should be defended on the same basis as the rights of all other European citizens”, and that the state had no business interfering with individual moral choices so long as no crime was involved. The committee declared him unfit to serve.

This blackball in the name of tolerance is itself intolerant and discriminatory. It need not, should not, stand. The European Parliament has no power to reject single commissioners, only the entire incoming Commission, whose new President, José Manuel Durão Barroso, maintains that he has confidence in Signor Buttiglione. To reshuffle his team before it even takes office would be a surrender to character assassination.

Senhor Barroso should, instead, actively dissuade Signor Buttiglione from throwing in the towel. A man whose definition of freedom is “not imposing on others what one considers correct”, and thinks that “Europe grows when we talk about the values we cherish”, has done nothing that disqualifies him from EU office. Among those values should be freedom of expression. It is not he who has raised the grim ghost of the Grand Inquisitor, but the secularist zealots who have had the gall to call him “spineless”. Voltaire would shudder.