Just when you thought it was safe to be gay, along comes Carrie Prejean, the runner-up in the Miss USA contest, who may have totally destroyed all hope of ever achieving full equality for the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community when she so astutely stated, “We live in a land where you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage. I think in my country, in my family, I think that I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman.”
Take that, Iowa Supreme Court! Ain’t no way on God’s green Earth your well-reasoned and unanimous legal opinion outlawing a state ban on same-sex marriage can stand up to such eloquence. And Vermont—which just became the first state to grant full marriage equality to gays and lesbians via the legislative process—better watch its back, too. Because when celebrity gossip blogger, pageant judge and all-around homosexual Perez Hilton asked Ms. Prejean whether she thought other states should legalize same-sex marriage, he unleashed a controversy that threatens to erase all the gains the LGBT rights movement has made over the past forty years (full disclosure: I was a former roommate of Perez Hilton).
OK, all sarcasm aside (well, maybe just some sarcasm aside) but as someone who has little patience for the snap judgments and bad writing of the blogosphere from where Hilton has fueled the growing brouhaha around Ms. 2nd Place’s comments, my first instinct was to ignore the whole thing. That is, until MSNBC (whose parent company, NBC just so happens to co-own the Miss USA brand) quoted Scott Ihrig, a gay man who attended the pageant as saying, “I think it's ridiculous that she got first runner-up. That is not the value of 95 percent of the people in this audience. Look around this audience and tell me how many gay men there are."
Now maybe I’ve become a bitter ole queen in my old age, but my question for Mr. Ihrig is WTF did you expect? Here is a contest that judges its participants on how much they exemplify fairly staid and traditional norms of feminine virtue and beauty (and how good they look in their Jessica Simpson-designed swim suits) and you somehow expected affirmation of anything but traditional marriage? That’s about as logical as expecting the Pope to hand you a condom on your way out of St. Peter’s Basilica.
What troubles me mostly is that our response as a community has been a collective ‘how dare she?!’ when we should be asking ourselves ‘how dare we?!!’. When our community has actual problems—exploding HIV infection rates, continued violence directed against transgendered folks, and California voters less than six months ago approving a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage—how dare we allow Ms. Not-Quite-Congenial-Enough’s comments to sting so many of us? Is it because the pretty girl with the blond hair, the one who probably dated the straight jocky boys in high school who represented so much of what we weren’t, rejected us? Or is it because we thought that if we played our minstrel-like part of Stanford to her Carrie Bradshaw that she would defend our rights?
Why didn’t Mr. Ihrig walk out of the event if he found Ms. Better-Luck-Next-Time’s answer so offensive? Why hasn’t Perez returned the money he was paid as a judge to the Miss USA organizers? Why have our national gay organizations not yet called on major corporations to stop advertising on all NBC shows or better yet, organized a boycott against General Electric, the parent company of NBC? And why have the most impassioned and creative pleas for marriage equality in the past few months come from Keith Olbermann and Stephen Colbert, two straight men? Do you think Barack Obama would be President today if Martin Luther King Jr. had let Johnny Carson deliver the “I Have a Dream” speech?
And speaking of Bammers, perhaps it’s time that we communicate the message that if he wants to continue receiving the millions upon millions of dollars the LGBT community funnels to the Democratic Party, it’s time he stop hiding behind the fallacy of states’ rights trumping civil rights—the same argument that was used to defend slavery—as his justification for not coming out in support of full marriage equality.
Would doing so be provocative? Probably. But unless we want to be the slave described by poet Ezra Pound that “waits for someone to come and free him,” it’s high time that we rethink the places, events and even political parties we support in the fight for our full freedom and equality.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Jamaal Young has organized electoral campaigns for LGBT equal rights in California, Maine, Ohio and Texas and worked for the Democratic National Committee during the 2004 presidential campaign.
Take that, Iowa Supreme Court! Ain’t no way on God’s green Earth your well-reasoned and unanimous legal opinion outlawing a state ban on same-sex marriage can stand up to such eloquence. And Vermont—which just became the first state to grant full marriage equality to gays and lesbians via the legislative process—better watch its back, too. Because when celebrity gossip blogger, pageant judge and all-around homosexual Perez Hilton asked Ms. Prejean whether she thought other states should legalize same-sex marriage, he unleashed a controversy that threatens to erase all the gains the LGBT rights movement has made over the past forty years (full disclosure: I was a former roommate of Perez Hilton).
OK, all sarcasm aside (well, maybe just some sarcasm aside) but as someone who has little patience for the snap judgments and bad writing of the blogosphere from where Hilton has fueled the growing brouhaha around Ms. 2nd Place’s comments, my first instinct was to ignore the whole thing. That is, until MSNBC (whose parent company, NBC just so happens to co-own the Miss USA brand) quoted Scott Ihrig, a gay man who attended the pageant as saying, “I think it's ridiculous that she got first runner-up. That is not the value of 95 percent of the people in this audience. Look around this audience and tell me how many gay men there are."
Now maybe I’ve become a bitter ole queen in my old age, but my question for Mr. Ihrig is WTF did you expect? Here is a contest that judges its participants on how much they exemplify fairly staid and traditional norms of feminine virtue and beauty (and how good they look in their Jessica Simpson-designed swim suits) and you somehow expected affirmation of anything but traditional marriage? That’s about as logical as expecting the Pope to hand you a condom on your way out of St. Peter’s Basilica.
What troubles me mostly is that our response as a community has been a collective ‘how dare she?!’ when we should be asking ourselves ‘how dare we?!!’. When our community has actual problems—exploding HIV infection rates, continued violence directed against transgendered folks, and California voters less than six months ago approving a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage—how dare we allow Ms. Not-Quite-Congenial-Enough’s comments to sting so many of us? Is it because the pretty girl with the blond hair, the one who probably dated the straight jocky boys in high school who represented so much of what we weren’t, rejected us? Or is it because we thought that if we played our minstrel-like part of Stanford to her Carrie Bradshaw that she would defend our rights?
Why didn’t Mr. Ihrig walk out of the event if he found Ms. Better-Luck-Next-Time’s answer so offensive? Why hasn’t Perez returned the money he was paid as a judge to the Miss USA organizers? Why have our national gay organizations not yet called on major corporations to stop advertising on all NBC shows or better yet, organized a boycott against General Electric, the parent company of NBC? And why have the most impassioned and creative pleas for marriage equality in the past few months come from Keith Olbermann and Stephen Colbert, two straight men? Do you think Barack Obama would be President today if Martin Luther King Jr. had let Johnny Carson deliver the “I Have a Dream” speech?
And speaking of Bammers, perhaps it’s time that we communicate the message that if he wants to continue receiving the millions upon millions of dollars the LGBT community funnels to the Democratic Party, it’s time he stop hiding behind the fallacy of states’ rights trumping civil rights—the same argument that was used to defend slavery—as his justification for not coming out in support of full marriage equality.
Would doing so be provocative? Probably. But unless we want to be the slave described by poet Ezra Pound that “waits for someone to come and free him,” it’s high time that we rethink the places, events and even political parties we support in the fight for our full freedom and equality.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Jamaal Young has organized electoral campaigns for LGBT equal rights in California, Maine, Ohio and Texas and worked for the Democratic National Committee during the 2004 presidential campaign.
csledbetter
whisper
