As a royal, our opinion on government is often sought but seldom paid for.  A queen’s life is not all glamour:  affairs of state take their tedious toll.

The twenty-first century celebrates the uncouth.  What deficient charm school produced the impertinent oaf who dared to ask our royal person about constitutional law?  It is a sensitive subject.  To be sure, constitutional monarchies exist, a beast we deem an oxymoron, and we do not favour them.  The U.S. Constitution was born out of the misguided belief that monarchs were unfit to rule.  Constitutions were all the rage for a while; every country had to have one, then every state of every country, and ultimately every philanthropic institution in the nation.  The constitutional craze has spawned a sea of essays, a veritable Talmud of the driest commentary this side of the Sahara.  And it has attracted some of the dweebiest scholars who ever tied a paisley bowtie.  Those who contend the Constitution isn’t a dull read should consider that it took one hundred and thirty-three years and nineteen amendments to get to the part about sex.

But the Constitution has had its run.  Battered about by the likes of Bush and Cheney, it has become a quaint document, something to be handed out in facsimile form to school children, that they may marvel at how the calligraphic Ss look like Fs.  If the Constitution becomes inconvenient, it can be amended, such as Florida and California’s constitutions recently were, in order to assure that marriage remain, ever and always, between one man and one woman.  If one, man or woman, asks why, one risks the great heresy of redefining marriage, and redefining marriage might lead to something more horrifying, more unspeakable than mere gay nuptials.  Unchecked, this redefinition business might lead to equality of the sexes. And there’s an amendment in that. But we outpace the royal self.

The Constitution was thrown together in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, ostensibly to replace the more hastily written Articles of Confederation.  But in reality the Constitution was a vengeance piece, a little jab at George III and such things as taxation without representation, mandatory quartering of soldiers, limits on the rights to bear arms—always a tricky one, that—and, of course, the repugnant Stamp Act.  Through the knock-off Bill of Rights, added as an afterthought in 1791, things like trial by jury and freedom of expression were guaranteed and cruel and unusual punishment, the term du jour for enhanced interrogation methods, was outlawed.  By the dawn of the nineteenth century the Constitution had been outfitted with twelve amendments, and the erstwhile colonists were feeling very smug.  We should also point out that, at this point in history, the Tories had all been tarred and feathered and dispatched to Canada.

Now, Tories were never the brightest candles in the chandelier.  They didn’t like change and they didn’t adapt well to it.  They argued vociferously against evolution without ever stating facts, when, one might note, they were themselves the best evidence against survival of the fittest.  They were, to be sure, a very old species, aristocratic, inbred, and unoriginal, and completely reliant on others to perform menial tasks for them, such as cooking, cleaning, and chewing their food.  They were devoutly religious, as long as that religion didn’t require them to love their neighbours demonstrably.  Their houses of worship were palatial temples dedicated to Mammon, and hypocrisy was a strong trait among them.  They didn’t fare well on the tundra, however, and eventually had to go Donner Party on each other.  Their tattered remnants virtually died off when private physicians could not be found to treat their gout. Only their disreputable offspring managed to eke out a miserable, liberal socialist existence north of the 49th Parallel. But even though their numbers were reduced, the indefatigable Tories still clung to existence and eventually clawed their way southward, planting themselves securely between and among the smug colonists.  Tories in America are called Republicans.

Since Republicans do not believe in sex, they apparently reproduce through parthenogenesis.  As this has been shown to be a fairly ineffective method, the Republicans are compelled to recruit, principally through the organ of Fox News.  The Republicans reached their zenith (or, more accurately, befouled the nest) under George W. Bush, whose administration shredded the Constitution and used the Bill of Rights to wrap fish in.  These Neotories partied till the wee hours, praising God and decrying Charles Darwin, exulting in xenophobia, racism, and misogyny, and issuing solecistic jeremiads against the homos and trannies until the bovines returned to their domiciles.  But those wandering kine, after eight long years afield, did make their way homeward.  The bottom fell out of the Republicans’ fox-guarded henhouse, the economy tanked, and the Tories went scurrying back into their burrows, hissing at the sun.

With their numbers once more diminished, the remaining Republicans have had to resort to amplified hissing. Last week some Republican nut-job—the description is redundant—stated that gay marriage was not constitutional.  In true Republican form, he repeated this statement several times, thereby making it true.  He was not obliged to show his work.  There is little doubt that such work would survive scrutiny, but, as a result of the Bush years, the American people are acclimated to this process wherein an appalling assertion, presented as a continuous-track mantra, becomes dictum.  Mr Bush is gone, but his anti-intellectual legacy lingers and, these days, hisses a bit.

Because the Constitution makes for dreary reading, we will only concentrate on the First Amendment, which is the first paragraph of the aforementioned knock-off Bill of Rights.  The Bill of Rights was actually copied from an English document, much as modern American sitcoms are pale counterfeits of their British forebears. Still, the amendment is worth quoting in full:

“Congrefs fhall make no law refpecting an eftablifhment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercife thereof; or abridging the freedom of fpeech, or of the prefs; or the right of the people peaceably to afsemble, and to petition the Government for a redrefs of grievances.”

What the First Amendment boils down to is freedom of expression.  It is a very dangerous amendment.  It would allow the abomination that is gay marriage.  This bit of constitutional excess, unimpeded, might permit such wanton fanatics as the Methodists to celebrate the Lord’s Supper with grape juice and saltines.  Soothly, if the Republicans did not hiss their objections, godless First Amendment civil libertarians might argue that Baptists had a right to total immersion, Calvinists to predestination, and Roman Catholics to the rhythm method of effective birth control.  And transgender activists have embraced the First Amendment too, stating that it guarantees their right to gender expression.  “Horrors!” cries the long-robed prelate, lifting his chasuble lest the taint of transvestite corruption touch his saintly vestments.  Great polygamous Mormons, Batman, such an amendment could only be the work of Freemason Nancy-boys in powdered wigs and knee-britches. No responsible government should tolerate this.

And yet, even as the royal fingers tap out this weighty essay on the royal keyboard, the royal television beams images of Barack Obama, standing before not a facsimile, nay, but before the very Constitution that made its debut on that sultry summer day in 1787.  Not to be outdone, Dick Cheney managed a sustained, simultaneous hiss on the other side of Washington, giving assurances to Tories everywhere that the new president’s attempts to restore that aging parchment would not go unchallenged.

The Tories will not be silent.  Playing to dwindling audiences, they perform their sibilant symphonies, warning of the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and of the Defense of Marriage Act and conjuring the spectre of a transgender-inclusive Employment Nondiscrimination Act.  These apocalyptic visions are brought to you courtesy of the First Amendment.  Wrapping themselves in the security blanket of august tradition, the Tory Republicans remind us that the LGBT community is made up of sinners and sodomites: sick criminals in the eyes of the Founding Fathers.  The Tories are not wrong in this view of history.

When the Constitution was written, gay men were criminals, and lesbians had not yet been discovered.  More precisely, women had not yet been discovered (cf. the Nineteenth Amendment, referenced above).  Furthermore, before ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, the Constitution permitted the peculiar institution of slavery.  The Thirteenth and Nineteenth Amendments reflect the changes in American society, its growth, and its slow but eventual realisation that constitutional freedoms should be conferred upon people who should have had them back in 1787.  The same situation now exists with respect to the LGBT community.  The American Psychiatric and Psychological Associations removed homosexuality from the catalogue of mental illnesses in the 1970s.  In 2003 the U.S. Supreme Court, in Lawrence vs. Texas, recognising that almost every state in the union had already struck down its own sodomy law, ruled that such laws were unconstitutional.  Homosexuals, then, are neither sick nor criminal, simply second-class citizens.  Regarding the transgender community, progress has been glacial; however, there has lately been a metaphorical global warming—the Tories will permit no other—and we do see movement toward equality.

As we saw during the Bush years, the Constitution won’t defend itself.  The document, housed in a case designed to withstand a nuclear holocaust, is yet fragile paper.  To be sure, it was the Constitution that granted the Tories the freedom to express scorn for the Constitution. The nation’s Tory leaders thumbed their noses at it with impunity.  But it is that self-same thumbed nose that will be cut off to spite the face of the Tory nose-thumbers if the Constitution, if the First Amendment, should be dismantled.  If a government will not defend its constitution, will not enforce its constitution, will not extend to all its citizenry the rights and privileges its constitution guarantees, then it has no business governing at all.  The reins of power may as well be given over to some despot, some brutish strong man, or, perhaps, to an enlightened monarch.  We attend your leisure.

When not providing the president and elected officials with her keen insight on constitutional law, the Dread Sovereign James responds to e-mails sent to her at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .