I’ve studiously avoided writing about the whole Miss California-gay marriage flap because I’m trying to confine my writing these days to the shinier, happier aspects of pop culture. But now that Carrie Prejean has revealed that she’s going to join the National Organization for Marriage in campaigning against gay marriage, and now that the Miss California organization has revealed that they helped pay for her breast implants prior to the Miss USA pageant, well, I can’t hold my tongue (or my fingers, as it were) any longer.
First, some back story on where I’m coming from with all of this. My mother was a hairdresser for over thirty years, which means I’ve been around gay men since, well, birth basically. I always joke that I knew gays before I knew what gay was, because it’s not like my mom pointed out every homosexual man to me and said “See him? He’s gay. That means he likes to have sex with men.” I don’t recall us talking in any great detail during my youth about heterosexual sex other than “Here’s how it works–don’t do it,” so we certainly weren’t having long conversations about gay sex.
I don’t even remember how I learned what gay meant. Just all of a sudden, in late grade school and early high school, everyone was using gay as a perjorative and I was able to make the connection between what my classmates were saying and my mother’s co-workers. And as gay equaled bad in our little narrow-minded, conservative-Midwest world, I had no problem–at least for a while–thinking that there was something somehow wrong with these men who worked with my mother. But logic finally took over, and I realized that my mother’s gay co-workers were some of the nicest people I’d ever met and that some of the straight kids at school could be pretty big shitbrains when they wanted to. People are people, and no matter what someone’s skin color, religion, sexual orientation, or whatever, there is good and bad in everyone.
The lessons I learned as a teenager have apparently blown right Carrie Prejean and her tribe of religious bigots. But, again, people are people, and while I vehemently disagree with the stance on gay marriage that she voiced during the Miss USA pageant, I respected her ability to forego the politically correct (and, I would argue, morally correct) answer and stick to her principles–prejudiced, closed-minded, heartless principles though they may be. I was able to sleep that night just fine, knowing that one day Carrie Prejean will wake up on the wrong side of history and she’ll have to live with those public comments for the rest of her life. But at least she wasn’t a liar, and she voiced a bigoted statement aloud that probably, at least in part, cost her the Miss USA title, and I can’t help but admire a little bit people who choose gut over glory, even if I can’t stand the person’s views.
But any teensy bit of understanding I had for Miss California already started to wane by the end of the next day, and not because Perez Hilton, the judge who asked her the gay marriage question, disparaged her on his website. Not to make excuses for Hilton, but if you’ve seen the guy’s website, then you know that disparaging people is sort of his job. Right or wrong, it’s what he does–to everyone. So expecting him not to take her apart was akin to expecting Carrie Prejean not to make the rounds of the morning talk shows to cash in on her moment of controversy–it just ain’t gonna happen. And those morning talk shows are where I started to lose my patience with Carrie. I mean, of course she was going to make the rounds to talk about the controversy–fifteen minutes of fame and all–but it was the fact that she was speculating aloud that her comments had cost her the crown that told me that she could potentially be positioning herself as the next martyr for the anti-gay marriage movement. But I hoped that she would just go away after a few days when the press tired of her, and she would go back to obscurity in California.
No such luck.
By throwing her lot in with NOM (an organization whose “gay storm” ad has been parodied so mercilessly that I’m surprised anyone takes them seriously), Carrie Prejean has gone from a one- or two-day media curiosity to a public representative of an organization that wants to actively discriminate against a segment of American society. And yet, still, I sleep well, knowing that the historical tide is turning and that should she continue to be a spokesperson for the anti-gay marriage movement, she’ll end up just as big a punch line as Anita Bryant or, to some extent, Sarah Palin–beauty queens with ugly hearts.
But the breast implant revelation put the final nail in her hypocrite coffin as far as I’m concerned.
And, no, I’m not against women getting breast implants, although I think they look stupid and I wouldn’t personally do it myself. Miss California can get breast implants and butt implants and a nose job and collagen injections until she’s had more rebuilding done than the Six Million Dollar Man for all I care. But don’t go on the TeeVee talking about how your decision to stick to your hate-filled guns cost you the Miss USA title when you apparently had no problem letting the Miss California organization pay for your surgical enhancements in order to increase your chances of winning said title. You can’t say “Sure…whatever it takes to win…cut me up and plump me up!” one minute and then claim that an unwillingness to compromise who you are cost you that win. The same God that Carrie Prejean feels doesn’t give gays the right to marry also didn’t give her the boobs she felt she needed to become Miss USA. But California Barbie has choices with regards to her appearance where gay couples in forty-six states don’t have a choice about marriage, regardless of what she said in her muddled response to Perez Hilton (Seriously. In “her America”–where things like boob and butt tape and wearing high heels with swimsuits are considered normal, people have a choice with regard to same-sex marriage or “opposite” marriage. But now, she’s actively campaigning to deny people the choice that she said they already have in “her America.” This poor girl doesn’t know if she’s on foot or horseback.).
According to a Miss California organization official (link above), Carrie Prejean wanted the implants so she could feel better about herself. I hope she remembers how good she feels about herself as she campaigns to keep people who love each other from getting married. Because people are people, regardless of their sexual orientation or how many fake parts they have. And homosexuals deserve to feel good about themselves by having the ability to express their love as they choose, just as Carrie Prejean has every right to feel good about her new fancy pageant boobs.
