Carrie Prejean rubs me the wrong way. I was talking about this with several other people who feel similarly last week after her laughable Larry King interview and it made me think about just what it is that is so offensive about this woman. Sure, she’s a shallow, media-obsessed hypocrite who has made a career of portraying herself as a Christian martyr who had a beauty crown taken away and was cruelly silenced because she dared to speak out about her deeply held religious beliefs when in fact, her almost incoherent pageant response about “opposite marriage” has been the best career move she’s ever made. Far from being silenced, she’s been launched on an almost non-stop media blitz: she has a new book out, has made countless TV and public appearances, and is a popular and sought-after speaker on the conservative circuit. I’m just not seeing how she’s suffered because of her beliefs…it’s seems to me much more like she’s cashing in. Of course there have been controversies along the way…inappropriate photos, sex tapes – and somehow Ms. Prejean seems to evade responsibility for all this as well. She treats any questions about this past behavior as “inappropriate” and characterizes even the raising of these issues as all part of the vast left wing conspiracy that is targeting her and her ideological mentor Sarah Palin. No matter what new revelation comes to light about this woman’s already cloudy past, her supporters rush to her defense, crying about what a shame it is that the media keeps bullying such a nice Christian girl. The insanity of the situation is maddening…which I why I so appreciated Candace Chellew-Hodge’s piece about Ms. Prejean on Religion Dispatches. The entire article is spot-on but I especially liked this part, which really cuts to the heart of the issue:
What really happened to Prejean is this: possibly for the first time in her life, someone stopped looking at her body long enough to listen to her words, and found her to be ugly. Her white, pretty girl, privilege has worked fine up until this point. It has opened all the doors she wanted – to modeling, to beauty pageants, and now to TV and book deals. For once, though, in that brief, shining moment at the Miss USA Pageant, her beauty was not what people saw — it was the ugliness of her words, the cognitive dissonance between a beautiful body and ugly bigotry that caused people to criticize her and that is what shocked Prejean. I’m sure, before this moment, no one had ever criticized her. They were too busy fawning over her because of her all-American good looks. She believed that her breasts, her pretty white teeth, her blonde hair, and her white skin would shield her from all attack. They had so far.
For a moment, I realized that I had yet another ally who saw through Carrie Prejean’s phony outrage and it felt good to know that although it may seem at times that nearly everyone is taken in by her routine, there really are plenty of people who see her for exactly what she truly is. Check out the article here: The Jarring Ugliness of Beauty Queen Carrie Prejean
