Carrie Prejean is not my idol

I normally don't write about current events in SM&OT because my life and my family occupy me enough. I do, however, get into pageants. Beauty pageants are just fun. Certainly there are women out there who do them who do them only because they are closet sociopaths who would otherwise be axe murderers if they didn't have pageants to do. What the public sees as a glow on their faces is actually a glower. What I have seen as a married contestant have been women who like to look great and who enjoy looking at the pageant criteria and applying it to themselves. Mrs. & Ms. beauty pageants are about a married woman or a woman past the Miss age, taking her talents and skills and applying them to her family and community. There are public speaking engagements, often singing and MC-ing, they pose as role models and spokeswomen for various groups. Aside from often keeping them busy in addition to raising families and volunteering, pageants offer women a chance to exercise talents that often go by the wayside once they become mothers and wives.

I have to say that Carrie Prejean makes me able to stand someone who I swore that I would never speak of, the notorious Paris Hilton, famed for her crotch shots and actions that only served to get her ink and clicks, although she did handle David Letterman's jibes with a lot of class.



I'm going to link over to Shannyn Moore's page because Shannyn writes about this better than I do, but go over and watch Prejean's performance with Larry King. Larry asks her several times about what made her decide to settle with the lawsuit that she had vowed to fight. Larry is a journalist and is supposed to ask these questions. He backed off after he asked a couple of times and Prejean called him inappropriate. When King switched over to a caller, a gay gentleman who asked her a question about her stance on gays, she removed her mic and acted very self righteous, repeating that he was being inappropriate. Larry, in my humble opinion, was not being inappropriate. He is a newsman, not her personal publicist.

I really hope that Carrie's actions cost her interviews with legitimate newspeople, and considering who she had declared as her hero before she quit the interview, her actions will get her a manicured-toe-hold with the people that the right has been exploiting for the last 25 years.

Thank you, CP, I am certain that the libertine (I say this with admiration) Ms. Hilton appreciates how you have made her look not only smart, but smart with an impressive, wide span of emotions while you look like you had your upper lip glued to your front teeth. I can stand Paris Hilton now!

May I have some cheese with my whine, please?

I'm ticked.

I covered the Mrs. Alaska United States Pageant and had a blast doing it. I used to make fun of pageants but after I did one on a lark when I was pregnant with Starshine, I got hooked. Pageants represent the present culture and the women who maintain those norms. Writing this, I see exactly how what has upset me represents this idea.

The winner was someone who really had her stuff together and who told me that her platform was instilling confidence in young women, starting with the mothers. Her real agenda is marriage as a one man, one woman thing and denying rights to others who are biologically inclined to their own sex. Never mind that gays have families and are like the rest of the population, good or bad, but not because of their orientation.

Forty-six hours after her win, she was on TV getting press, leading children and protesting the municipal ordinance that would grant equal rights to everyone.

The pageant organizer told me that "I was there to make sure that she represented her position without taking an anti-gay position. She was clear that her position was neither for or against homosexuals, but was against her right to vote on this issue." News footage suggests other things. This woman is a member of Prevo's church and what she had said her platform was is quite different from what she is saying now.

This is probably under the carpet now-- but I am not happy that a pageant winner would be so openly against equal rights and be wearing a tiara and sash to get press on it. Gays are huge in pageants. You don't bite the hand that feeds you. I regret that this may have temporarily sullied the Mrs. Alaska Pageant, which is not like this.

I'd publish her picture, but it would probably just inflate her ego. She had seemed so nice!