Royals

My Yahoo homepage proclaims, next to a picture of the newly wedded British royals, "History in the making!" The irony of this proclamation was probably wasted on its writer. History in tiresome replay is more like it.

The royal wedding included the King of Bahrain on its guest list. He declined. Too busy mowing down anti-royal protesters in his country with arms provided by Britain and America. This was most likely not on the mind of the sanctimonious Archbishop of Canterbury as he blessed the anachronistic union.

Louiss XVI of France (1754-1793)

Royal weddings represent the god-given riights of some to be superior to all others. Royal weddings represent the principle that he who rewrites history and controls it rules. Royal weddings represent billions in media advertizing revenues. Royal weddings represent the enshrinement of heterosexual marriage, motivated in provenance and wealth preservation, as the iconic ideal of civilization. Royal weddings are a subtle justification of oppression by virtue of historical precedent.

There is no place for royalty in a world of universal human rights and economic justice. Common people who idolize royals are either ignorant of history or infected with a bourgeois aspiration to privilege at the expense of others and society in general. The British insistence upon propping up its royals represents the same false ideology that is represented by those conservatives who sanctify the Founders of the United States. It is a defense of economic injustice and a false history, written to protect those who are against economic justice and universal human rights. As a humanist, whose personal practice is geared to supporting human rights and economic justice, I find the very existence of royalty in the 21st century a sad indication of how far we as a species have to travel to actualize our full humanity.