Indelicate Manipulation Of Social Pressure

This very attractive young lady from La Jolla, California appears to think that because she is against the idea of same-sex marriage, she did not become Miss USA. Leaving aside the vapidity of beauty pageants, it seems quite odd that someone moving in that world would not recognize that a significant part of "competing" in such an event involves appealing to gay men. Indeed, the issue came up when Perez Hilton, an openly gay gossip columnist serving as a judge for the competition, asked what the contestant thought about gay marriage and she gave the "wrong" answer. Miss California says she has no regrets even though she thinks that the answer cost her the crown. Well, that's nice.

Let's assume that this is what actually happened, that the winner and this young lady were otherwise equally-qualified. That is probably not true, but on the other hand, it's difficult for me to appreciate exactly what qualifies one to win a beauty pageant anyway aside from being hot and at that level, they're all hot. (The winner, a young woman named Kristen Dalton from North Carolina, is pictured to the right and as you can see, she's very attractive also.) And asking a gay man to decide whether one woman is hotter than another is more than faintly ridiculous. But like I say, let's assume this is true anyway. Let's also assume that the politics of beauty pageants are important to the shaping of larger political policy issues, which they probably are not but somehow this seems to be gaining headlines so maybe they are despite my sneer.

It's actually kind of a touchy game. On the one hand, it puts pressure on people to be more publicly in favor of the desired policy. But on the other hand, it risks the creation of a backlash against that policy as a form of "political correctness." Where you want to be in the manipulation of social pressure is to make it so all the "cool kids" think same-sex marriage should be legal. Where you don't want to be is in a situation where approval of same-sex marriage is imposed on people from some kind of an authority. So if it's true that giving an answer to this question displeased the judges of the beauty pageant enough that it changed the result, then we're in that second universe, the one where authority is imposing opinions rather than peers encouraging it. That's backlash territory.

Of course, the real change will only come when people realize that their own religious preferences are not to be imposed on others, when they remember that "live and let live" is an important and worthwhile ethic to pursue in one's life, and when they see that giving recognition to gay couples does nothing to alter the fabric of society. Until then, there will continue to be debate over the issue as people who do, perhaps from a place where they think they are acting out of good intentions, reach for and cling to whatever flimsy rationalization they can find to justify a policy position which has bigotry as its taproot.