Prejudging Prejean

I have so many mixed emotions about these semi-nude photos of Miss California Carrie Prejean, exposed on TheDirty.com.

When asked about gay marriage at the Miss USA pageant, Prejean said that it was great that Americans had a choice. The fact is that they don't have a choice except in Connecticut, Massachusetts and Iowa (it will be legal in Vermont on 9/1), so Prejean is ignorant at best.

I also think that anyone who denies basic civil rights to any citizen is a bigot. All the arguments against gay marriage mirror the comments made during the civil rights struggle, when African-Americans were denied their equal rights under the law.

Then came word that the California state pageant paid for Prejean to get breast implants in order to put her "in the best possible light on a national stage" , thus making her a first class phony.

I applaud any woman who gets breast surgery to correct deformities, reduce excessive size, or for reconstruction after a mastectomy, but when an obviously attractive and healthy woman gets breast augmentation merely to win a contest, it puts her in the porn star category as someone just selling his or her body for money. It's objectifying the already objectified.

So when a bible-thumping ignorant bigoted phony is shown posing in sexy lingerie with a come-hither look on her face, she adds hypocrite to her rapidly expanding list of labels.

I really don't care if she posed totally nude, or topfree, or even made a sex tape - the problem here is that she has taken hypocrisy to a new stratospheric level by wearing her religion on the sleeve of one arm, while wearing her sexed-up phoniness on the other.

I don't know Carrie Prejean, she might well be a fine person and all of this is merely a public-relations disaster, or she might be a victim of the whole pageant industry which has gone from celebrating female beauty to manufacturing it.

Beauty pageants have disappeared from nudist resorts, and the Miss America Pageant, once the queen of them all, has trouble finding a basic cable channel to carry their event. Perhaps this Carrie Prejean fiasco will spell the end of this outdated, sexist and objectifying practice, or the old adage of "all publicity is good publicity" will actually generate more interest by a public hungry for tawdriness.