I've been avoiding talking about Carrie Prejean and her latest scandal because, honestly, I feel bad for her about it and don't think she deserves to be humiliated in this manner by an unscrupulous ex-boyfriend or anyone else.
But she has a new book out and she's making the rounds promoting it and inevitably the topic is bound to come out, as it did in this interview with Meridith Vieira on "The Today Show." But what I am most interested in begins around the four minute mark, when Prejean goes into right-wing victim mode, claiming that conservative women are under attack, comparing herself to Sarah Palin, and complaining that nobody would ever say nasty things about women like Sonia Sotomayor or Michelle Obama:
Prejean: Well, I think it's important for people to understand. I think that Americans heard only bits and pieces of what really happened and I think that there is a liberal bias in the media. And it's unfortunate that conservative women are attacked, they are attacked for their beliefs and it's unacceptable and it shouldn't happen. And so many Americans are frustrated, so many Americans believe that their beliefs are under attack and that they should silent and free speech doesn't exist. Since when does free speech not exist? Since when is someone able to go on national TV and call someone the most awful names you could ever call a woman and get away with it?
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Vieira: You say in the book you've been "Palinized" ... what do you mean by that?
Prejean: You know that attacks Sarah Pailn is under, don't you?
Vieira: But you think if you're a conservative woman ...
Prejean: Do you think Sarah Palin's been attacked?
Vieira: I think Sarah Palin has certainly been criticized, absolutely, by a lot of people, as have many politicians.
Prejean: And there is a double standard out there. There is an extreme double standard that conservative women are under attack for whatever it is. I mean, if Sean Hannity went out there and said some of the things that Keith Olbermann has said about me, you know if he said anything about Sonia Sotomayor or Michelle Obama, he would be off the air. Why is there this double standard? And that's the reason why I wrote this book.
She's right: nobody on the Right would have ever attacked Sotomayor or said anything offensive or crazy about her.
Carrie Prejean addressed the Values Voter Summit today and we have uploaded her entire address in two YouTube videos below, but for those who don't want to sit through her the entire fifteen minutes of her self-pity, defiance, martyrdom, and egotism, here is an edited version in which she declares that she was called by God during the pageant to stand for truth and so "even though I didn't win the crown that night, I know that the Lord has so much of a bigger crown in Heaven for me":
Last month, after Miss USA contestant Carrie Prejean set off a firestorm for saying she opposed marriage equality and then linking up with the National Organization for Marriage to promote her views, there was lots of talk that she might be stripped of her title as Miss California.
At the time, Donald Trump, who owns the Miss USA Pageant, decided that she could keep her title while Prejean, after portraying herself as a vicitm, vowed not to talk about the issue of marriage any more.
But today Trump apparently reconsidered his decision and has now stripped Prejean of her title, citing breach of contract:
The Miss California USA Organization, with the blessing of owner Donald Trump, announced on Wednesday that Prejean would lose her crown due to "continued breach of contract issues."
"This was a decision based solely on contract violations including Ms. Prejean's unwillingness to make appearances on behalf of the Miss California USA organization," Miss California USA Executive Director Keith Lewis said in a statement to ET. "After our press conference in New York we had hoped we would be able to forge a better working relationship. However, since that time it has become abundantly clear that Carrie is unwilling to fulfill her obligations under our contract and work together."
"I told Carrie she needed to get back to work and honor her contract with the Miss California USA Organization and I gave her the opportunity to do so," Trump said about the decision. "Unfortunately it just doesn't look like it is going to happen and I offered Keith my full support in making this decision. Carrie is a beautiful young woman and I wish her well as she pursues her other interests."
Since Prejean was already fast on her way to becoming a right-wing superstar, this latest development will probably be good for her career as she is now free to dedicated herself full-time to her victimization in the name of her favorite cause: preventing gay people from getting equality.
In just a matter of weeks, Carrie Prejean went from an utter unknown to a household name, stemming from her stated opposition to marriage equality when asked about during the Miss USA pageant.
Miss California Carrie Prejean could be stripped of her title after organisers say she breached her contract by keeping topless photos secret.
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Apart from not being up front over the semi-nude pictures which appeared on an internet site, organisers of the Miss California USA pageant say Carrie Prejean also breached her contract by appearing unauthorised in commercials.
But just when things were starting to look grim, Prejean was awarded the highest honor any aspiring Religious Right activist could desire: a two-part interview with James Dobson
Jim Daly, president and CEO of Focus on the Family, said the Christian community should stand behind Miss California, even after a racy photo of her appearing in panties appeared on a gossip blog.
"In her moment of truth, standing on a national stage and defending marriage, that meant more for the cause of marriage than anything else," he said.
Several conservative Christian groups praised Carrie Prejean for her voicing her opposition to same-sex marriage during the Miss USA pageant. After a racy photo of her was posted on the web, Prejean said her Christian faith was under attack and that the photo was taken while she was a teenager.
CitizenLink writes, "Daly pointed out that we are all sinners, saved by grace."
"I think at this moment, we should stand behind Carrie," he said. "The reality is we’re all fallen people, we’re all made in God’s image, and Jesus has come to set us free."
Dobson will interview Prejean for a two-day broadcast starting Monday.
By comparison, Sarah Palin, the single most beloved figure in recent Religious Right history, only received one episode when she was interveiwed by Dobson last October.
Liberty University has a long list of scholarships available to prospective students - some require good grades, some require military or ministry experience, and some require memorizing 750 Bible verses.
But if that is too much work, you can always just try speaking out against marriage equality in a nationally televised event and Liberty will start throwing scholarships at you and begging you to transfer:
Liberty University has offered a scholarship to the beauty queen who expressed her opposition to same-sex marriage during the Miss USA pageant.
School Chancellor Jerry Falwell Jr. made the offer yesterday to Carrie Prejean, who was visiting the conservative Christian school.
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Prejean, who's a junior at San Diego Christian College, was first runner-up in the pageant. She hasn't said whether she'll transfer to Liberty for her senior year.
Joined by Carrie Prejean, the now-famous beauty contestant who lost her crown when she spoke up for marriage, the National Organization for Marriage today launched the second in a series of television ads to be released as part of NOM's ongoing Religious Liberty Ad Campaign. The new ad, "No Offense," opens with footage of Ms. Prejean's response to a question she was asked regarding same-sex marriage during the Miss USA competition on April 19, 2009. The ad highlights the efforts of same-sex marriage activists to silence and discredit pro-marriage advocates, calling them "liars," "bigots," and worse. Over the protests of gay marriage advocates, a group of prominent religious liberty scholars (including scholars both for and against same-sex marriage) recently warned the Connecticut legislature that a bill codifying the state supreme court's ruling on same-sex marriage raised the potential of "widespread and devastating" effects for religious liberty, if robust exemptions were not provided for faith groups and religious organizations.
The most interesting part comes near the end with the narrator asserts that advocates of marriage equality are trying to silence those who oppose it "because they don't want to debate the consequences of same-sex marriage. They want to silence opposition. Some of the nation's foremost scholars warn that gay marriage can create widespread legal conflicts for individuals, small businesses, and religious organizations."
The NOM ad then flashes the quotes "will create widespread and unnecessary legal conflicts" and "effects would be ... devestating" on the screen, but doesn't say where they came from.
In the press release on its website, NOM instead links to thesetwo letters [PDFs] addressed to Christopher Donovan, Speaker of the House in Connecticut, showing where the quotes came from. The only problem is that the authors weren't warning of the "devastating" effects of gay marriage - they were urging the state legislature to pass an exemption for religious organizations when it enacted its marriage equality law:
We write to provide you with an analysis of the effects of Raised Bill 899 on religious liberty. Those effects would be widespread and devastating. If Raised Bill 899 is passed in its current form—without religious-conscience protections—many religious organizations and individuals will be forced to engage in conduct that violates their deepest religious beliefs, and religious organizations would be limited in crucial aspects of their religious exercise.
In the only comprehensive scholarly work on same-sex marriage and religious liberty to date, legal scholars on both sides of the same-sex marriage debate agreed that codifying same-sex marriage without providing robust religious accommodations will create widespread and unnecessary legal conflict.
The second letter comes from Douglas Laycock, Yale Kamisar Collegiate Professor of Law at the University of Michigan, who is a supporter of same-sex marriage and wrote to the Connecticut Legislature to urge them to add such an exemption in order to prevent the Religious Right from playing the victim:
[I]is it in the interest of the gay and lesbian community to create religious martyrs in the enforcement of this bill. To impose legal penalties or civil liabilities on a wedding planner who refuses to do a same-sex wedding, or on a religious counseling agency that refuses to provide marriage counseling to same-sex couples, will simply ensure that conservative religious opinion on this issue can repeatedly be aroused to fever pitch. Every such case will be in the news repeatedly, and every such story will further inflame the opponents of same-sex marriage. Refusing exemptions to such religious dissenters will politically empower the most demagogic opponents of same-sex marriage. It will ensure that the issue remains alive, bitter, and deeply divisive.
The National Organization for Marriage (NOM) applauds the Connecticut legislature which, in a surprise move today, adopted substantive religious liberty protections as part of what was expected to be a routine bill implementing the Connecticut court decision ordering same-sex marriage.
"We are just grateful that the Connecticut legislators acknowledged and addressed the serious potential implications of same-sex marriage for traditional faith communities," said Maggie Gallagher, president of NOM. "We hope this decision represents a change of heart among gay marriage advocates and a new willingness to accept broad conscience protections."
So NOM posted two letters urging the passage of a religious exemption to the state's marriage equality law - an exemption that was granted and hailed by NOM - yet is taking quotes from those letters out of context in their new ad to suggest that marriage equality itself will somehow have devastating effects for the nation, when the letters said nothing of the sort.
One thing I have never understood about the conservative movement is its knee-jerk willingness to hail any person who happens to gain media exposure while expressing conservative views and immediately turning them into the face of the movement.
They did it with Joe the Plumber and now they are doing it with Miss California, Carrie Prejean, who stated her opposition to marriage equality when asked about during the Miss USA pageant last week. Since then, she’s been hailed in just about every right-wing media outlet, including World Magazine, WorldNetDaily, OneNewsNow, and Townhall, praised by the likes of Harry Jackson, Roy Moore, Day Gardner, and Gary Bauer, and recently “hired one of the country's premier Christian PR firms, A. Larry Ross Communications—which represents such evangelical powerhouses as Rick Warren” to deal with all the media requests.
Miss California may have lost her shot at becoming Miss USA after expressing her opposition to same-sex marriage, but she’s nevertheless emerged as a star.
After getting booed by the beauty pageant crowd and berated by one of the contest judges on Sunday, Carrie Prejean is suddenly a conservative sensation, a poster girl for the right who has bloggers, talk show hosts and Republican pols singing her praises.
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An Alabama state legislator introduced a House resolution praising her for speaking out against gay marriage. In a press release, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins stated his “admiration and support” for her and lauded “her fortitude in the face of continued baseless personal attacks.”
“There’s a lot of people cheering you tonight that you stood on your principles, that you put the principles above winning,” Fox News talk show host Sean Hannity told Prejean when she appeared on his television program. “Not enough people do that. And I admire you a lot for it.”
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“I would like to nominate Miss California as the new face of the marriage movement. Much better than mine!” National Organization for Marriage President Maggie Gallagher wrote on National Review’s The Corner.
The praise from Gallagher is especially interesting because, as Good as You noted, earlier this week she was Twittering that she was about to meet Prejean for lunch – a lunch which must have been quite a success because Gallagher’s fantasies about turning Prejean into the face of the anti-gay marriage movement are about to come true:
Miss California, Carrie Prejean, who offered memorable opposition to same-sex marriage and a young, attractive new face for the movement against it, will appear tomorrow at a press conference hosted by the National Organization for Marriage at the National Press Club, according to a press release from the group.
She'll be launching a new ad, the second in what the group says is a $1.5 million campaign.
The ad, the release says, will address:
What happens when a young California beauty pageant contestant is asked "do you support same-sex marriage?" She is attacked viciously for having the courage to speak up for her truth and her values. But Carrie's courage inspired a whole nation and a whole generation of young people because she chose to risk the Miss USA crown rather than be silent about her deepest moral values. "No Offense" calls gay marriage advocates to account for their unwillingness to debate the real issue: gay marriage has consequences.
