primogenitor

I thought that developments that significantly redress God and Country might be headline news and not just for the governors of the sixteen Commonwealth Realms (The Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, CHOGM, which sounds an awfully lot like the Spacing Guild of Dune, The Combine Honnete Ober Advancer Mercantiles, CHOAM) that share the British monarch as their head-of-state have together acceded to radically reform laws concerning Royal Succession at a summit in Australia. Deference to males is removed, so the eldest child, whether a boy or a girl, becomes the heir-apparent (absolute primogeniture), which seems like a very reasonable and forward-thinking thing to do to our modern minds but I believe, like the BBC reporting puts it, that our point-of-view masks the real comprehensive (three centuries of the past, present and future) perspective and impact it has. Perhaps equally as sweeping is the change that would allow the monarch and members of the royal family to marry Catholics--though as Supreme Head of the Church of England, the monarch himself is necessarily Anglican. It strikes me as impossible to get one's head around the lifting of this restriction without delving through all the revolts and revolutions of history. Had the Act of Settlement of 1701 never come into force, as the Daily Mail speculates, and all other things being the same (which is deliciously unlikely), then the UK's current ruler would have been Franz, Duke of Bavaria.  The Queen, looking forward to her Diamond Jubilee, suggested these reforms be entertained and has certainly added something more to her considerable legacy.