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…”