Disturbing the queen

Photo: Amdi Thorkild, Politiken

Eleven Greenpeace activists have been indicted under an archaic Danish “lèse majesté” law called paragraph 115. It was during the death throes of the COP-15 climate summit that the activists dressed up as gala guests and crashed the queen’s party. Once in, they unfurled a banner calling on world leaders to combat climate change and were immediately ushered away by guards.
Apparently, queen Margrethe is said to have been disturbed by the banner, although her comments are nowhere to be heard. Instead the Danish Public Prosecutor, the Prosecutor General and the Justice Ministry are charging the activists with “disturbing the peace of the monarch”.
But who is she to demand to have her peace undisturbed? The rest of us get ours disturbed now and then. It’s a fact of life. If Margrethe has the fragility of a potato chip and gets disturbed by the unfurling of a banner, she wouldn’t last long in the real world. And what about the peace of the protesters? Wouldn’t that be disturbed by going to court? Not to mention prison?
There hasn’t been a need to use paragraph 115 since the 1920’s, which means no royals were sufficiently disturbed by, say, the Nazi occupation. But now the unfurling of a banner has Margrethe shaking in her stockings?
Please, who believes that? There must be something else going on here.