Ex-Miss Calif. says gay comment is why she lost her crown

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Prejean told Matt Lauer on NBC’S Today show Friday that she “absolutely” had been dethroned because of the comment, when she said marriage should be between a man and a woman.

Prejean lost her title Wednesday after the California pageant’s executive director said Prejean was skipping Miss California USA events while speaking out against gay marriage at unsanctioned appearances.

A bit more here.

I've avoided posting on this story because it was beginning to look like nothing was going to come of it. I mean, you know, minor celebrity says something people don't like, people bitch about it and try to get her fired, yadda yadda, and it all dies down. But that's apparently not what happened.

So once again I find myself compelled to defend a conservative idiot.

I've got to agree with the former Miss California on this one: she lost her crown because she is opposed to gay marriage and was willing to go on the record saying so. I mean, okay, the technical reason for her dethroning has something to do with a dispute about how she was performing her "duties" as Queen of California, but it is impossible not to suspect that this would have all been negotiated away somehow if not for her infamous "opposite marriage" statement at the pageant. Kind of like the whole Ward Churchill controversy--they nailed him on trumped up plagiarism charges, which were ultimately nullified in court, but what they were really trying to get him on was his controversial essay about 9/11.

In short, pageant officials in California, who were straight-up telling her "ixnay on the odgay stuff," decided that the only way they could get rid of what they deemed embarrassing behavior was to nail her on whatever they could dig up. First it was the extraordinarily tame nudie pics, which pageant owner Donald Trump declared to be within the rules, followed by this "duties" business. And they got her. But it's pretty obvious that the motivation behind it all was shutting her up.

Of course, I don't know all the rules for the Miss California Pageant, but it seems to me that contestants don't have to check their political views at the theater door--otherwise, they'd have dismissed her immediately. And if political speech is against the rules, well, that would be pretty fucked up. Needless to say, America necessarily must thrive on political speech, everybody's political speech: democracy doesn't work without it, even if much of that political speech is bullshit.

Okay, I can imagine some speech moving into hateful rhetoric, like Imus' "nappy headed ho's" comment, but simple opposition to gay marriage doesn't come anywhere near that. I mean, you know, Prejean is wrong and everything, and weirdly hypocritical, given her religious views juxtaposed against all her cheescake work, but nothing she's said, that I know of, actually falls to the level of what we would call "hate speech."

Really, the whole damned controversy is downright bizarre, and is yet another revelation of totalitarian strains on the left. So she's opposed to gay marriage. Big fuck. Lots of people are. Why must she be punished and purged? The girl's entitled to her opinion. Persuade her to change her mind; don't fuck her over. It's lame when conservatives do it, but worse when the left does it--the left should know better.

Ugh. It always leaves a bad taste in my mouth defending conservatives like this.


Carrie Prejean, some hot Christian action I could really get into!

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