A royal mess
If you have been following the news you might have seen that Denmark has a new royal baby on it’s way. THIS is CNN.
Princess Mary is pregnant. Which is great. She’s a lovely woman. And our monarchy needs it after the divorce of the other prince and his princess Alexandra. Happy times now.
This baby might some day rule Denmark.
Might.
See, if the baby is a girl then she might not become queen. The Danish constitution doesn’t allow female succession. So if the baby is a girl and she gets a brother some day, then the brother will have first right to the throne.
It kind of amuses me that we in 2005 in a highly educated country like Denmark have a rule that basically says “boys are better than girls”. We allow gay people to get married, but we can’t give a firstborn girl her rightful throne.
Of course I am not a pro-royalist. I’m not a fan of the monarchy. So I’m not overly concerned with what’s going on. I just think it’s odd. If our constitution said the world was flat, would we go looking for the edge?
The really funny thing is that our main reason to have a monarchy seems to be PR. We’re always told what great PR the royal family gives us. What great representatives of Denmark they are. Well who are our great representatives? Prince Henrik? Who has barely mastered our language after all these years? Who throws hissy fits because people don’t give him as much credit as the queen? Nope. Well how about the two young princes then? One of them is now divorced and appears regularly in the tabloids where he is pictured as something of an alcoholic womanizer. The other one is now expecting a baby and seems to be doing well, but in his youth he was pretty much only known for dating models and exceeding the speed limits in his cars. So nope again. The person who is a great representative for Denmark, the person whom everybody loves, the person who has illustrated Tolkien books… is Queen Margrethe. A girl. A girl who wouldn’t have become queen if there had been any brothers born. Isn’t that something to think about?
April 28th, 2005 at 22:48
Oooh, I had no idea Prince Henrik was so high-maintenance! Queen Margrethe has always struck me as such as amazing person anyway, and then recently I watched this six-part documentary on “The Father in Law of Europe” which went into great detail about the Danish royal family since the 1800s, and I was left completely in awe of her. Of course I think it would be quite marvellous if a half-Australian sheila became Queen, too. (Adore your new site, darling.) Love, R xxx