Queen fight

Since I'm on record as being dismissive of the whole beuaty pageant thing, I almost hate to end up taking the side of Carrie Prejean, the Miss California who may have been denied the USA title for having the "wrong" answer to Perez Hilton's question about gay marriage. Is there anybody out there more mean-spirited and self-involved than Hilton? I think he is not a very good representative of the other members of his group and might set back their acceptance by mainstream America for a very long time.

After calling out Miss California on her not politically correct answer about gay marriage, Perez Hilton proceeded to bash her in the most denigrating terms for females in the entire English language. He not only referred to Carrie Prejean as a "stupid bitch" in a post-pageant video tirade, but in a MSNBC-TV interview during which he confessed he'd really been thinking of calling her the "c-word."

I mean bloggers, of course.

Whatever happened to the good old days, when beauty contestants were allowed to enlighten us without facing such harsh reactions? Remember Miss Teen South Carolina 2007, who gave us a geography lesson? ("I believe that our education, like such as South Africa and Iraq, everywhere like, such as, our education . . . should help the U.S. or should help South Africa and or should help Iraq and the Asian countries so we will be able to build up our future . . . ") Well, as Richard Roeper of The Chicago Sun-Times points out, that spirit is alive and well today, and can be found in the answer given by Miss Arizona to the question, "Do you think the U.S. should have universal health care as a right of citizenship?"

Miss Arizona's response: "I think this is an issue of integrity regardless of which end of the political spectrum that I stand on. I've been raised in a family to know right from wrong, and politics, whether or not you fall in the middle, the left or the right, it's an issue of integrity, whatever your opinion is and I say that with the upmost conviction."