Why do we still care about pageants?

It’s Friday. Five days ago, many turned their attention to yet another degrading ritual of western womanhood—the Miss USA Pageant. And while many just enjoyed ogling the poor contestants, I have been fuming all week about the comments made by two of the beauty queens.

Let’s begin with the more famous of the two—dear Miss California’s heartfelt, but not-so-intelligent response to the question about whether she believed all states should legalize gay marriage:

"Well I think it's great that Americans are able to choose one or the other. Um, we live in a land that you can choose same sex marriage or opposite marriage and, you know what, in my country and in, in my family, I think that I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman. No offense to anybody out there. But that's how I was raised and that's how I think that it should be between a man and a woman." (Thanks Wikipedia).

What? The final sentence would have sufficed. In any case, Miss California now believes she lost to Miss North Carolina because she gave a politically incorrect answer. I’ll come back to that, though.

The winner, the aforementioned Miss NC, made an equally offensive statement when asked her “big” question of the night, but only my beloved Allan Combs (who for some reason is only aired at 11pm on our local conservative talk radio station) seems to have addressed the gaff. She was asked what she would do with a time machine. Her response? Go back to the 1950’s—because it was such a great time, so peaceful, and all about families.

Really? Let’s look at that peaceful thing. If you were black or even gay, my guess is that life was far from peaceful. Those pain-in-the-butt racist segregation laws? Not peaceful. What about all those beatings, burning crosses, and lynchings? Not my idea of a quiet way to spend the day.

And family? Well, in the 1950’s, no one would have given a damn about what Miss NC would do with a time machine, let alone whether or not she wanted to go to college or stay at home and cook and have children. Nope—her life would have been about family, and probably not much else. Of course, that only applied to middle and upper class white women. Women of color and the poor always had to balance a job with family responsibilities.

So give me a break about the 50’s idealism. I, too, sometimes fall into that “romantic” notion of history—but then I remind myself that women in most cultures had no rights, people of color were not considered worthy to participate in the fruits of our freedom, and even animals had a worse deal than they do today.

But what about Miss California? Well, I hope she did lose due to her response. Being out of step with supporting gay marriage is no different from opposing civil rights in general—because that is precisely what it is. It would be like a 1950’s Miss USA Contestant saying that she supported segregation because “that's how I was raised and that's how I think that it should be…”

Separate and unequal…

Call it whatever you want, just not marriage. Marriage is between a man and a woman—to call it something else is to change the meaning of the word, and it has always meant one thing.

That is the argument I found myself listening to on a talk radio show this morning while I cleaned out Stormie’s playpen. My first thought was that historically, marriage has meant many things—sometimes involving more than just two people (eastern cultures, anyone?). But what I really fixated on was the whole concept of naming the joining of two gay people something other than marriage. A look back at history will help validate my concerns.

Think back to segregation. Separate but equal. But we know it never was. Public accommodations—from schools to hospitals—were never the same between white establishments and black establishments. The places reserved for blacks were consistently inferior—despite what Justice Henry Brown argued on behalf of the Supreme Court in the Plessy vs. Ferguson case: “…the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority [is a fallacy]. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it” (Don’t Know Much About History, pg 280). We know, however, that Justice Brown’s argument was the fallacy—not the perception or some collective ‘chip on the shoulder’ of the black community. Evidence of this is seen today in the ‘failed schools’ legislation that allows students from failing schools to have the opportunity to attend a better performing school; we no longer accept the idea that places like schools perform at the same level.

So, back to that marriage thing. If we don’t call a union between two adults, regardless of sexual orientation, a marriage, then whatever subsequent label we do give that union will inherently be inferior to marriage. How could it not? It won’t be a marriage—it will be something else. And perhaps that something else will create an opportunity to deny benefits—such as spousal privileges or access to programs such as social security upon the death of one partner—that one could argue are solely reserved for those who are married. Separate but equal terms for one of the most sacred commitments many of us will ever enter into? I think not.