Miss Anti-Gay USA

I've got a new piece up at The Guardian's CifA about the Miss USA contestant who answered a question about same-sex marriage by saying "in my country, and in my family, I think that I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman," and is blaming her subsequent loss on her unwillingness to compromise her values.

Considering that beauty pageants have a 1950's Rosie-the-Rivetwho? sensibility about them, I suppose it shouldn't surprise anyone when a contestant holds political opinions from the same era. But such reasonable explanations would necessarily preclude a week's worth of Drama! and Scandal! and Recriminations! to turn the loser of a two-bit dog-and-pony show into the glamorous martyr of a sequin-drenched political circus.

Miss California, having promptly lost the pageant to Miss North Carolina, nee Kristen Dalton, after her disastrously bigoted answer, is now taking to the airwaves (Wow — the Billy Bush Show? What a coincidence!) to claim her sweet Christian answer cost her the crown:

It is a very touchy subject and [Perez Hilton] is a homosexual and I see where he was coming from and I see the audience would've wanted me to be more politically correct. But I was raised in a way that you can never compromise your beliefs and your opinions for anything.

Including supporting basic equality for those darn touchy queers. 'Cuz that's not what God, who was testing her faith by having one of those darn touchy queers ask her the question, wants. The only reason God even makes gay people is to test the faith of sweet Christian heterosexuals; he doesn't put them here to live full lives of their own and fall in love and have families and get married. Duh!

Read the whole thing here.