F.D.

This is so embarrassing:

BBC: Monarch faith role 'should stay'

Prince Charles should not become defender of all faiths rather than just Christianity when he becomes King, the Archbishop of Canterbury has insisted.

Yes, that's right, embarrassing.

We Brits have a head of state whose job it is to defend religious faith—specifically the one, true Anglican Protestant faith (not the whole of Christianity, as the Archbishop conveniently forgets).

Look on a coin: ELIZABETH II D.G. REG. F.D. (or, to give it its full Latin, ELIZABETH II DEI GRATIA REGINA FIDEI DEFENSOR)—Elizabeth II, by the Grace of God Queen and Defender of the Faith. A daily reminder that our monarch is required by our famously unwritten constitution to defend one particular brand of religious mumbo-jumbo. Defender of the Faith: a title first conferred on a delighted Henry VIII by Pope Leo X (a Roman Catholic) after Henry wrote a book utterly condemning the new-fangled Protestantism. Go figure.

I mean, if it wasn't embarrassing enough in the first place for a country governed by the so-called Mother of Parliaments to have a hereditary monarch as a head of state, we should hang our heads in shame that the land that gave the world Newton, Hooke, Darwin, Faraday, Lyell, Kelvin, and a host of other enlightened geniuses—not to mention the sodding Industrial Revolution—still has a boss who is supposed to defend to the death one ridiculous religious sect against all others.

To think that we shake our heads in (hopefully literal) disbelief at what's going on in the Middle East and Sudan. Talk about motes and planks.

Utterly, utterly embarrassing.