Celestia was unmoved, even as the reverberations from the doors swinging open caused her coffee to splash and orbit her mug. "What's the outrage this time?"

"Behold." Celestia's breakfast was lucky to escape the path of the book being slapped down on the table.

"What am I looking at."

Celestia murmured while she read the passage that Luna was jabbing her hoof at. "...year 838… royal summer villa in what is now the Silver Coast… Princess Luna and her friend Dione…"

"You're going to have to jog my memory, I knew a lot of Diones back then."

Celestia took a deep breath, and a long sip of coffee.

"Why on earth would a publication claiming to be a history publish such an obvious lie?"

"Were you planning on retiring in the next hour?"

"Yes. Have some coffee."

"You took to it quickly."

"A necessity when researching for whom historians have decided the gift of my heart was not significant enough to be recorded. Much is written about my tryst with King Sombra, presumably because of the melodrama, but prior to that only Augustus, Lyterius and Colonnus are listed as romantically involved with me. Lutetia and Petra are described as 'handmaidens and advisors', and poor Cygna isn't even mentioned at all…"

Celestia held a grimace.

"Have you noticed a pattern?"

Luna squinted, and looked back through the book for a second, then let it fall down again suddenly. "It's all the mares! They only erased my relationships with women!"

Celestia had progressed to a wince, but nodded.

"That is simply vile! Why would they do such a thing? And why did you not correct them?"

"This is something that goes back to the feudal period. To La Princesse en Dieul."

"Let me finish, there's lots of things in play here. You remember how things were during the first diarchy around the subject of…" Celestia circled a hoof while she searched for the word. "Coupling."

"You were… setting an example so to speak."

"Well, you see… gosh, this is difficult to explain because it's so abstract. Do you remember when Lutetia eloped with you?"

"Yes, her father wanted title in exchange for her hoof and I was insulted that he would consider her property to be bargained, she told me later that he had all but imprisoned her in their villa and she had to undertake an escape."

"Why did you think he did that?"

"Basically, yes. But he was already a landowner, and such an attitude was not… uncommon among landowners. With money to be made, everything starts to be for sale."

"Regrettably so. Such a custom was difficult to police when the equites themselves were engaging in it."

"Well, after the Nightmare Moon crisis and the birth of feudalism… who do you think was writing the laws?"

"How do you think I feel about taking a vow of silence for 87 years?"

"It was something of a perfect storm. My renunciation of absolute power coincided with the peak of the perception of you as, well… a monster. Everything you represented became somewhat tainted - even today, the word 'lunacy' refers to insanity. But this included your… prolific personal life."

"To have multiple lovers, to engage in relations with the same sex, to place the heart above the wishes of the head of the household… they became associated with a descent into violent madness. At the same time, I was becoming the image of purity. The chaste, silent, passive queen."

Celestia lurched, spilling her coffee into her cereal.

"Yes, Luna. I just wasn't ready for such unbecoming language."

"But yes, you are correct, there was no substance to any of this - it was just a narrative that suited the interests of those who benefited from feudalism. The public figure most associated with a liberated personal life could be pointed to as a villain in a story whose moral was obedience. Marry who father says you are to marry and produce lots of heirs to carry on the title."

"That part is a little less settled. There were definitely a lot of feudal lords who would have liked to subjugate the entire female sex using my silence and passiveness as a template, but that was difficult to square with the whole…" Celestia gestured vaguely at her spectral mane. "Either I was divine, which meant ponies were superior but so were mares, or I wasn't, which meant stallions were free to order their wives around, but ponies' position on this earth wasn't privileged. You ended up with a lot of complicated regional variation on the approach. In the feudal period we had a lot of contact with Grifreich-"

Celestia smiled. "- which could be alternately used as evidence of equality or a symptom of barbarism. In the south, the old deer tribes were frequently patriarchal, so the same trend could be reversed. The precise details of Equestria's gender politics are very complicated, especially over such a long time, but the important part is that the rise of feudalism was a powerful push towards a more restrained, reserved way of life. It planted a seed that still blossoms today."

"So why did this not change with the liberal revolution and your return to public life?"

"Well… some of it changed. It became difficult to justify the subjugation of women after that point. Male primogeniture never fully took in Equestria, and all but died out by the 17th century. Parliament has always been mixed. The last vestige of this sexism in law was the transition from householder voting to individual suffrage in the 1878 constitution. In this respect Equestria has been something of a leader in civil rights, with some countries taking until the 20th century to catch up fully."

"Well… yes, unfortunately. Even after the institution of parliament, inheritance remained a crucial pillar of social organisation, and try as you might-"

"Two mares will not produce an heir."

"Surely you must have known, in your heart of hearts, that to punish such relationships was a baseless oppression."

"This was the period where we were sending armies into Sylvania every couple of years, so my moral judgement at the time is not what I'd call the most reliable. Truth be told, the issue never really made it to the top of my agenda. I was always fighting Parliament, conducting diplomacy, performing royalty, participating in the study of magic…"

"I'm… I'm sorry, Luna."

The table was quiet enough to hear palace workers shuffling all the way down the hall, or birds alighting on the flagpoles at the gate.

"In all of the things I have learned about the turns of history in my absence - all of your mistakes and compromises - I think this is the first one that is specifically to my detriment."

Celestia waited, and listened.

"The wars, the colonies, the… deference to the greediest ponies imaginable, these harms are obvious, and have impacted untold millions throughout history, but this is the first thing I've learned about where it feels like… you betrayed me, personally."

"Don't… I don't want an apology for something you neglected hundreds of years ago. It feels selfish to ask for one from you, when this was presumably neglect and not active participation."

Celestia breathed for a moment. "Would you like to hear the rest of the story?"

"I cannot, unfortunately, take credit for such progress though. It started with the scientific advances of the industrial revolution. Among the superstitions peeled away by the advance of science was the idea that homosexuality causes insanity. The idea was slow to spread, but by the 1930s, the foundations of modern medical practice around sex and sexuality were being laid - and then the Tyrians got involved."

"Well it didn't get better immediately, in fact it got rather a bit worse for a while. The Tyrians hated the Institute for Sexual Studies. They didn't want their understanding of the world upended. So they created a moral panic - they seized the zeitgeist from Labour with a reactionary platform, and when it got them elected, policing them out of existence and reaffirming the penalties on homosexuality was one of the bills that crossed my desk."

"My objecting quill got a lot of use in that session. The welfare state barely survived. Targeting the Institute was ruled unconstitutional by the court, but their penal laws went all the way to referendum, and… passed."

"At that point Parliament had gotten quite good at dealing with the Right of Sovereign Objection. They just factored referendum campaigns into their policy calculations. I did all I could, but that doesn't mean the people were idle." Celestia paused. "Remember that Pride parade I mentioned last year?"

"It's time you learned what that was about. As you will very well know, the heart wanders where it will, and no amount of legislation is going to change that."

"So the penal laws didn't stop anyone from being…" The word seemed to stumble on her lips. "... gay, it just forced them to meet in secret. Well, more than they already were."

"Yes, they use it themselves. For decades this subculture continued underground, until eventually, in the 1960s, it… burst. The social pendulum was swinging back towards progress anyway, but it was being pushed from the bottom. A police raid against a suspected gay bar in Seaddle turned into a riot, which turned into a rallying point for demonstrations. They made allies in the unions, which made gay rights a Labour party policy, and from the 1990s on it's only become better and better to be openly gay in Equestria. Pride is the celebration of that progress, as in, the opposite of the shame of being forced to hide their love from the world."

Celestia chuckled and groaned. "Luna, please, we're trying, okay?"

"I know, I know. Say, I have to ask about this… alliance with the unions. It seems unlikely at first blush. Perhaps I am underestimating the common factory worker."

"Well, there are two aspects to it. One is the inherent egalitarianism of the underlying philosophy of the organised labour movement. The other is the simple practicality that they found themselves a common enemy in the police."

"These days the police have both gay officers and a union, so maybe love really does conquer all."

"Just something I hadn't thought about until now. In the old days we would be surrounded by guardsponies; today there are police officers. Something has felt different between the two but it's been difficult to describe exactly what. They appear in places I don't expect them to be, like heralds of misfortune."

"It's a bit of a tangent, but criminal justice has evolved considerably in the last thousand years. We don't have travelling magistrates and tithings and night watches anymore - we have professional civil servants tasked with the preservation of the peace, and we call them police. They don't even carry blades around anymore - most of the time the uniform is sufficient, and failing that, sticks and tactics."

"So if the police are merely acting in preservation of the peace, and the unions and gays were able to find a common enemy in the police, that sounds rather like an accusation that they were disturbing the peace."

Celestia paused. "I suppose. There is a natural… disorder to the tactics of protest. There is a proper way to conduct demonstrations, in which an interested group expresses a desire to march on a particular day, and the city and the police know what to expect and can prepare. The same applies to a strike, it's common for striking workers to picket outside their workplace to make their dissatisfaction known, but there are laws about where and how you can do so to minimise disruption outside of the specific dispute."

"But it's more than that, isn't it? It was a police raid that ignited the…" Luna closed one eye for a moment. "... gay rights movement. Is this to imply that the gay bar was disturbing the peace?"

"Well, no, the police were just pursuing the enforcement of a law which was, in hindsight, unjust."

"I know, but I was overruled by the referendum, there was nothing I could do."

"That there was nothing I could do?"

"Those words come from your lips very often. Every time your principles and bureaucratic process collide, the process wins, and someone suffers for it."

"Luna, I can't just override the institutions of democracy whenever I want, it's not right! Do you think I should just threaten people with the unmitigated power of the sun every time a bad actor takes advantage of parliament? Should every silver-tongued scoundrel be sent to the moon? Have you judged democracy a failure and we should just… go back to being tyrants to save people from themselves?"

Luna scrunched her muzzle up, and shrank a little in her seat. "That's… not what I'm saying."

Celestia brushed a stray hair out of her eyes, and cleared her throat. "You can't catch all the rain, Luna. If there's anything you should be taking from these conversations, it's that things that seem like good ideas at the time can come back to bite you. An alarming amount of our laws are written in blood."

Luna remained quiet for a while, before taking the book off the table. "I have historians to contact."

"I'm surprised you haven't been drowning in solicitations."

The completeness with which Celestia's frayed temper of a moment ago had vanished gave Luna a moment's pause. "A few have. I believe their conclusion was that I had little to offer that they had not already learned from you."

"It seems they were mistaken."

"Indeed." Luna stood to leave, and dithered as Celestia finished her toast. "Did you ever accept a suitor?"

"You used to be swarmed by them. Princes, lords, dukes, all of them you turned away. You seemed more bored by them than anything else. None catch your eye in the meantime?"

"Oh." Celestia thought for a moment. "No, not really. The idea of courtship, especially with someone who I'd be guaranteed to outlive, seemed like… a waste of time. Cheap power plays from nobles trying to increase their standing. It would be improper."

"I had no desire to. My favourite bedfellows have always been a warm cup of tea and a good book. In fact - speaking of the gay movement, there are some who would describe me as asexual. Probably because that would make me one of their own."

"Oh, interest groups try to claim my membership all the time. Remember the Daybreak Party?"

Celestia chuckled. "I never particularly understood your proclivity for… consorting. Didn't it break your heart? Falling in love and watching them wither, over and over?"

"I never saw it that way. All those around us are doomed to perish, whether we bring them close or keep them at a distance. T'is better to have loved and lost, than to have never loved at all."

Sovereign Objection

by hahatimeforponies

October 1st, 2013