{"id":339,"date":"2003-10-10T20:13:22","date_gmt":"2003-10-10T23:13:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/?p=339"},"modified":"2003-10-10T20:13:22","modified_gmt":"2003-10-10T23:13:22","slug":"dutch-prince-renounces-throne","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/?p=339","title":{"rendered":"Dutch prince renounces throne"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span class=dropcap>D<\/span>uring last week&#8217;s power outage I frequently phoned &#8216;home&#8217;. During one of those conversations with relatives oversea, someone mentioned something about the troubled state of the Dutch monarchy: apparantly one of the sons of the queen was intending to marry a human rights activist. Which was basically OK, until the press found out that the woman (Mabel Wisse Smit) apparently had had an intimate relationship with a notorious Dutch gangster, something she had denied earlier before. Today prince Johan Friso announced that <a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/2\/hi\/europe\/3181514.stm\">he&#8217;s giving up his succession rights<\/a> so he can marry his controversial girlfriend, after the Dutch prime-minister said he was not going to ask the parliament for permission for another royal wedding.\n<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>This doesn&#8217;t sound fair, because everyone should be allowed to marry the person he or she loves, right? But there&#8217;s something unique and actually amazing about this Dutch law, concerning the marriages of royals: it&#8217;s about protecting <em>both<\/em>  the monarchy and the democracy. Somewhere&#8217;s in 1850 (or around that year) the Dutch monarchy gave up their responsibility for the affairs of the government in trade for <em>inviolability<\/em>, meaning that prime-ministers are responsible for any wrongdoings of the royal house. Now compare this with the English situation where the English parliament has no say over what their royals are doing.\n<\/p>\n<p>So in the Dutch situation both monarchy and democracy wins: the prince can marry his girlfriend and the Dutch democracy (and monarchy) cannot be held responsible for eventual future &#8216;misfortunes&#8217; of the prince.\n<\/p>\n<p><small><small>Note: I just noticed I actually had problems pronouncing the name of &#8216;Mabel&#8217;. Is it Maaaahbel, Maaaaaaaaaybell? In Dutch it still would sound like a silly name. I feel sorry already.<\/small><\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>During last week&#8217;s power outage I frequently phoned &#8216;home&#8217;. During one of those conversations with relatives oversea, someone mentioned something about the troubled state of the Dutch monarchy: apparantly one of the sons of the queen was intending to marry &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/?p=339\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=339"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}