Column:

Former Miss California taken too seriously

By Christina Stiehl

Published Nov. 17, 2009

The Miss Universe Organization is a tough franchise. In order to compete in its beauty pageants, including Miss USA, Miss Teen USA and their preliminary state competitions, young women have to spend countless hours and dollars on attire, beauty treatments and various coaches for posing, talent performance and question answering.

If the competition process wasn't stressful enough, the winner must maintain the moral image and ideals of the pageant title during her reign, which are oddly enough not as shallow as manicures and spray tans. Just ask Carrie Prejean.

Prejean is the notorious former Miss California who received criticism during the Miss USA competition for her stance against same-sex marriage. She placed first runner-up in Miss USA and though her conservative answer angered the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and questioning community, at least she was trying to answer honestly in reflection of her political and religious beliefs. Following the pageant, Prejean's behavior became less virtuous.

In June, Prejean was stripped of her Miss California title due to contractual violations, including missed appearances and unauthorized scheduling conflicts, according to nytimes.com. Although topless photos of Prejean surfaced shortly after she was crowned Miss California, these pictures were not cause for her termination.

Not willing to take her punishment lying down, Prejean filed a lawsuit in August against Miss California USA Co-executive Directors Keith Lewis and Shanna Moakler, as well as publicist Roger Neal, claiming slander, libel, public disclosure of private facts, religious discrimination and intentional infliction of emotional distress, according to abcnews.com.

In a bizarre twist of events, Lewis' company K2 Productions countersued Prejean in October over the $5,200 it loaned her for the breast implant surgery before the Miss USA competition. Earlier this month, both parties dropped their lawsuits and settled due to an extenuating circumstance about which the former Miss California seemed to have forgotten: her sex tape.

Prejean now joins the ranks of Paris Hilton and Pamela Anderson as not only a star in an explicit home video, but also as an author. Her book "Still Standing" is now on bookstands and as she tours the talk show circuit to promote it, she seems to be digging herself into a deeper hole of negative media attention.

One might find it ironic that the focus of Prejean's book is her battle with bad press, yet she throws herself into the spotlight via inappropriate means, such as naked pictures and sexually explicit videotapes. Hypocrisy might also come to mind as her self-proclaimed Christian faith apparently prevented her from the title of Miss USA, yet that didn't stop her from receiving pageant-funded plastic surgery.

"I don't think there's anything wrong with getting breast implants as a Christian," Prejean said according to EOnline. "I don't see anywhere in the Bible where it says you shouldn't get breast implants."

The Bible also doesn't discuss the morality of having a sex tape or topless photographs, but that's beside the point. Personally, I don't think people should be so hard on her.

Sure, Prejean is kind of an idiot. But she first gained notoriety through a beauty pageant. Although the Miss Universe Organization pageants claim to award women who are "savvy, goal-oriented and aware," and though these pageants do grant thousands of dollars in scholarship money, we all know the winners are chosen based more on physical appearance than any sort of worldly knowledge. After all, Prejean insisted that Americans "can choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage."