athameblade

My Miss California rant

By now, I’m sure almost everyone heard about Miss California’s controversial answer to Perez Hilton’s question on the Miss USA 2009 pageant. If you haven't: he asked her if she thought the rest of the states should legalize gay marriage.

While Miss California had every right to express her own opinion and can be given points for courage, she wasn't very diplomatic for someone in a pageant, nor did she consider her judges and audience while selecting her wording. Even if one didn’t need to be diplomatic and fully representative as Miss USA, she should have considered this: People, as always, have strong feelings about their views, and judges are fallible as many humans are in that they may not always have the ability to differentiate thoughts from feelings within short moments of time. Of course, they're going to vote against someone whose statements piss them off. She still came pretty far by making second place, though, meaning she wasn't actually "disqualified" as Bill O'Reilly thinks. Judging a pageant is so subjective anyway.

It's not what she said, it's how she said it. So I'm with Perez on that aspect. She even stated in interviews afterward that she would have phrased it differently if she could do it again and that she was too nervous to think as well as she would have liked. Do I wish her style of thinking could be thrown in the garbage like last week's moldy leftovers? Yes, of course. But had she answered it more generally and maybe, following that, added her personal view as an ending note, I wouldn't have had as much problem with her.

I don't give her intelligence points because she doesn't differentiate between church and state marriage - just as our current system doesn't, unfortunately. If it were me answering the question, I'd have said let people have their religious marriages however they like (most traditional religions being heterosexist for procreation reasons and to avoid the discomfort and threat of change without adequate knowledge), but civil marriages can't exclude a certain subgroup and be just in the American way at the same time. (Civil unions don’t bestow the same benefits as marriage, as the system stands. Why don’t we just call all legal marriages “civil unions” and call ceremonial marriages “marriage”?) The developments of this day and age have become a wake-up call that the institution has violated this separation principle in a way that has been taken for granted. And there's more than enough documented empirical evidence that gay unions and gay-headed families do not harm society or create more gays.

The other thing that bothered me about her answer was the way she said people "choose" to have same-sex marriages, which gave me the sense that she also believes sexual orientation is a choice. (It turned out my intuition was right, since I read this later: http://perezhilton.com/2009-04-27-did-she-really-just-say-that) Again, there's evidence saying otherwise: it's biologically hardwired, and if people can choose which gender to date, it means they're wired a priori to be bisexual. A major brain structure determining sexual preference – a part of the hypothalamus - has varying sizes among the sexual orientations, and correspondence between size and orientation can be experimentally induced in animals. The list goes on...

But it's so much more convenient not to bother looking up this sort of information, isn’t it?

Easier to simply think that if you’re straight and you want to be, then everyone else can be whatever they want to be. (As opposed to hiding what they naturally and unchangeably are versus not hiding it, based on social pressure. Or just choosing the socially acceptable route if you’re bi.)