Europe is definitely more secular than America… but they’re not immune from religious nonsense interfering with the government.
Case in point: today, on Good Friday, there is a ban on dancing in many parts of Germany. It’s called Tanzverbot.
I found a lot of poorly translated articles on it in German, so maybe a reader can shed more light on the matter.
But I did find this reference to it in a book called Hitler’s Dancers:
The mechanisms of an entire systen that tried to gain control over every possible area of life had taken on perplexing and monstrous dimensions. Bizarre, inhumane, useless, and at the same time destructive empty and crazy — Tanzverbot, “dance prohibition,” was an authentic reflection of German circumstances in a very special German time. Although in the end it was ideologically ineffective and politically nonsensical, this ban on dancing demonstrated one thing above all: no place, no matter, no issue was too trivial for National-Socialist arbitrary tyranny to ignore.
Yet, it’s still going on…
(Thanks to Jason for the link!)