UPDATE: Flowchart: Should You Pay Attention to the Royal Wedding? :)
Nope, I'm not interested in the upcoming royal wedding but it's hard to go anywhere online without seeing stuff about it, and today when I saw an article I really disliked, I decided to post some of it along with a bit of another different article I'd seen at Feminist Philosophers.
First, here's some of the one I disliked, at America magazine's blog, The ghosts at the royal wedding by Austen Ivereigh, which manages to combine romanticism, bigotry, and a jab at the Church of England .....
[...] At the heart of tomorrow's ceremony is a winning combination of elements which film-makers strive after: on the one hand, what is totally "other" -- a dreamy, fairy-tale setting: the marriage of a prince, the making of a princess -- with what, on the other, is universal and human: boy meets girl; they fall in love; they marry.
And as some bishops have already been pointing out, what happens tomorrow is a great tribute to the institution of marriage -- the union of a man and a woman for the purpose of creating and rearing children. There are many "alternatives" to that model around us -- same-sex unions, single parents, divorced couples -- and advocates of equality would want us to be believe they are all equally valid. But they aren't. History, research and experience all point to a stable, loving marriage between a man and a woman as the best possible environment for a child -- measured by almost any outcome .....
The ghost at tomorrow's banquet, indeed, is that, for all each has sought to blend itself with the age, both the Church of England and the monarchy are deeply rooted in an historical moment when the British nation was born -- a Protestant island besieged. And they continue to be defined by that moment, and to need each other to be so defined. The moment is frozen in the laws. The Act of Settlement of 1701 ... a Roman Catholic is specifically excluded from succession ... Now watch the Church of England squirm ....
And now, to gain a little perspective, here's a bit of the other post, Kate's Kismet by Gail Dines at Counterpunch .....
For the last few months my British accent has been the bane of my life. Let me explain. Everywhere I go in this country I am accosted by locals asking me for details on the royal wedding. As if a lefty Jew from the north of England would have any inside knowledge of the workings of the English upper-class long known for their anti-Semitism and love of all things Conservative .....
Kate is certainly going to be turned into a princess on her wedding day, and given the track record of how the royal family treats its women, she should be anything but thrilled at the prospect. Should she decide not to play the game of loyal royal wife, then she need only look to Diana or Sarah Ferguson to see her future .....
The British and American press have run stories about the way William’s friends make fun of Kate for coming from a family that has actually had to work for a living. Evidently especially humorous is that fact her mother was once a flight attendant. William’s family is the richest welfare family in the world yet you won’t hear David Cameron attacking them for being lazy freeloaders .....
