I’m not the one denying that there was indeed a choice to refuse assent. Why do you continuously portray the liberals as an indomitable force that must be yielded to at every turn, especially at the expense of civil society and at the expense of the church?
Furthermore, if something uttered about the queen happens to be a lie, the proper response is legal force and not silence, because silence turns it into the seeming truth.
A rather bizarre non sequitur, if I may say so, from anything I've said.
Furthermore, if something uttered about the queen happens to be a lie, the proper response is legal force and not silence, because silence turns it into the seeming truth.
If that were to be the case, then the Queen (and indeed any other prominent public figure) would need to employ a whole army of PR hacks to deny daily gossip. Not only would this be counter-productive, in the end it would be bound to fail, since the moment you miss something and fail to deny it it would universally be assumed to be true. In any case, it would completely undermine the constitutional status of the advice the Queen gives to her ministers: the essence of which is that it's private and confidential. The moment you breach that confidentiality by confirming or denying, that status is lost.