May 6, 2009

Courage at a Beauty Contest

Catch up on the story!

The Question and Answer

Miss CA Respond's to controversy

When did it become a bad thing in this country - hell, in this WORLD - to speak your mind and stand up for the beliefs of your heart? When did we decide to go overboard on political correctness to the point of demonizing a 20-something girl for having courage in her convictions? I think we could learn something from this young woman. Even if we don't agree with her, what she did took guts and a level of maturity that it seems the entire country has not reached.

This is sad considering how nearly everyone (myself included) makes fun of beauty pageant contestants for that stereotypical, "world peace" answer. You know you did the same thing! So why now, when a contestant finally breaks out of that little box, do we feel the need to shoot her down at every available opportunity?

Some people would like us to believe that it would have been better for her to 'be a good little girl' and just feed everyone the usual line of BS that political correctness demands. Those people are of course the very same ones that were right next to me in line to take a swing at past beauty pageant contestants for their mind numbingly-stereotypical-shallow-idiotic lines about how "We all just need to get along, with smiles and giggles and sparkly unicorn farts, tee-hee!"

Pardon me, but holding hands and singing around a camp fire is just not my brand of fun, and I am glad that they finally found a contestant that could actually have an opinion and still maintain existence.

So my take on the situation is…

We have been silent for too long. And what has that silence gotten us? This is the fruit of our silence:
We can no longer disagree with political policy because we are called racist.
We can't tell a woman she is beautiful without being called sexist.
And, we can't criticize a certain senator anymore because we are called ageist.
What's the point? Yeah, these are awful things to be called and hard accusations to get rid of, but at this point who cares? I think the silence has gone on long enough. Can you even imagine where it will end up if we continue this ridiculous charade of political correctness? If we can't criticize the socialists, we're going to have a new Holocaust. If we can't criticize the people claiming that (insert any group) people are evil and should be killed, we're going to have a genocide. If we can't criticize the terrorists - people whom we know are just itching to kill us, our country is going to fall under severe attack.
We are so concerned with not offending someone that we put a gag in our own mouths in an effort to not hurt someone's feelings, and in the process, we sacrifice our own hearts and minds on the altar of 'social acceptance.' And it's not just social acceptance, it is the social acceptance of a bold and vocal few who have been using this era of political correctness to their own gain. And forgive me, but I always believed that America was about the desires of the many, not the disciples (and decibels) produced by the few. That isn't freedom, that's just peer pressure. Political Correctness is straight out of the halls of high school, and ought to have been left there. That's how it goes, the loud and proud misguided crowd offers the rest of us the forbidden fruit, and those who succumb to peer pressure take that bite that changes history - and the way things are going, it was one hell of a poisoned apple.

I would like to take this opportunity to offer you some advice: If you are doing things right, then you will piss people off, so use this as your gauge to how effective your argument is. The more furious they get, the more proud of yourself you can be (providing you are using a good argument and can actually back up your claims). If their only response is blind anger then you know they were incapable of responding with logic, and that is a good sign.

    I say this not as an expert in arguments, but as a person who has spent much of her life arguing with people, defending one controversial view or another, and intentionally starting flame wars all over the place.

We all have a right to have our own personal opinions. Or do you agree that someone else's rights (or fight for those rights) trump someone else's? The Bill of Rights is not a game of Spades! If you will notice, the girl said that she personally believes marriage is between a man and woman, and good for her. What she didn't say is that gay people are freaks who don't deserve the right to marry. So why is everyone so up in arms as if that is what she said, word for word? What she said was not offensive; it was quite a polite way of expressing an opinion that is shared with much of the country (evidenced by the recent votes).

We are apparently living in a time that is Freedom of Speech-Lite: all the substance of speech with none of that pesky Freedom stuff that everyone is so tired of these days.

So here is this woman who is trying to live her life by her own beliefs and not compromising on them - good for her! We could take a lesson on that, too.
Compromise never gets you the best. It gets you less than the worst.

So what we are left with is this new frontier for Free Speech and Courage: Beauty Pageants.
God help us if we now require beauty queens to make us realize what is wrong with this country.