The Free Speech of Beauty Queens

One of my guilty pleasures in life is watching the so-called beautiful people in this world open their mouths and make fools of themselves. An arena rife with such opportunities is beauty pageants. Who could ever forget Miss Teen South Carolina explaining to us why Americans can't find anything on a map? Seems everyone of these debacles of late has someone sticking their foot in their mouth up to their hip. Apparently this is some lame attempt by pageant operators to impress us with the intelligence of their contestants. I do not doubt that some of these women are smart; just not very good ad libbing.

Now comes the saga of Miss California in the Miss U.S.A. contest a couple of weeks ago. To a question about same-sex marriages she responded that she believed that marriage was between a man and a woman and that she opposed granting marital rights to homosexual couples. I am paraphrasing but you get the gist. It was one of the more straightforward answers I had heard to one of these beauty pageant questions and I thought nothing of it. Obviously I am totally out of touch. One of the judges, Perez Hilton, went off on his own little hissy fit about it and claimed that she lost the crown of Miss U.S.A. based on that answer. He had some other demeaning statements about her but, since I am not the president of the Perez Hilton fan club I'll let you Google it for yourself. Smelling blood, the media got out their shovels and dug up the following information on Cari Prejean; she has had breast augmentations and she made some risque pictures when she was seventeen. The objective was very clear: punish her for having an opinion different from theirs. Forces with the pageant sought to have her title as Miss California stripped from her and throw her naked (augmented) body in San Francisco Bay. That last part was a joke but probably their secret desire.

This all culminated yesterday with her tearfully defending her right to express her opinion because her grandfather fought with Patton for that right. After hours of examing these photos (God knows how many), that great arbiter of justice, Donald Trump, decided that the photos did not violate the morals clause of his pageant and she would keep her crown. All is right in Pageant Land once again and, with some luck, we will hear little more about it going forward.

Seriously, we can all learn a several valuable lessons from the experience of Ms. Prejean. First, know your audience. She obviously did not realize the views of the judges of the pageant were markedly different from hers and, with state after state recently voting to allow the abomination of same sex marriage, the judges were not interested in her opinion, just mouthing a statement that supported them and the rest of the entertainment industry. Second, the right to speak your mind does not bar people from critizing you. I admire her somewhat inconsistent convictions to a traditional definition of marriage there is more to taking a position than mouthing a couple of sentences. The people opposed to her are ready for a fight and they have microphones. Finally, the traditional morality in this country has been replaced by whatever form of moral relativism the media and pop culture decides it to be. It will continue to erode as long as we keep letting it.

Ms. Prejean, if you can't bring your A game to the fight, shut up!