First and foremost I am consistently baffled by the constant references to the attractiveness of Carrie Prejean, and by extension the other contestants, win or lose.   In the 'leaked' semi-nude pics of her she looks better, but like many of these beauty contestents I find her at best moderately attractive, and in full on 'beauty queen' mode positively frightning.  

Moving on.

I find that I am one of the few people actually noticing the dichotomy in the gay marriage debate regarding California (proposition 8 and now Miss Prejean, who is, naturally, Miss California...).  A HUGE amount of the impetus and focus in the debate seems to be coming out of that state, while two very public oppositions have also come from... that state.  Maybe its because all of my expirences (one exception) with California have been in the central valley region rather than the Bay Area and Hollywood jetsetters. I know, I know, you expect more glamor and glitz from your resident yellow fuzzy sex god, but there is only so much one Pika can do...

But that is neither here nor there.  The red/blue divide on political issues, which oddly enough (to me) includes sex, is not ACTUALLY a state vs state divide but an urban center vs rural heartland debate... to put it in somewhat facile terms.  The same can be seen in Washington, where the heavily urbanized pacific coridor dominates the political landscape on the national level in an intensely liberal fashion, while the state politics are more divided with everything east of the mountains having political stances not too dissimilar from what you'd expect out of Idaho or Montana... gun owning freedom loving bible thumpers who want the state to let them live in peace with their bitterness.... of course not everything west of the mountains is hippie free love emo goth socialist activism... Tacoma is a former industrial town and the politics can be a little more divided there, and the smaller towns can go either way.   California is far more than San Fran and Hollywood and from what I hear Sacremento is significantly at odds, politically, with LA/SF and the rest... thus the success of Prop 8 and the existance of Prejean... the heartland of the state is rural agricultural.

No. What interests me, the heart of this musing I suppose, is the level of vehement hatred Miss Prejean inspired with her simple statement.  Personally I feel the entire debate is wrong headed and over simplified to the point of idiodicy, and incidentally that Miss California was simply wrong, but more to the point she had every right to make that answer.  Of course, the Miss America people had every right to use that answer to deny her the victory that had been, apparently, hers up until that moment.  So far everything is relatively fine.

But what of the aftermath?  We have the rather brutal excoriation of Miss Prejean by the 'celebrity judge' who had asked the question, first calling her a bitch, then a few days later retracting that to call her a cunt, both on national television.

Full stop.

Lets cover that one, relatively minor, example of what I'm musing about. Perez Hilton, the judge, is a flamboyantly gay male.  He asked the question because, naturally enough, its a topic that is highly relevant to him.  The presumption here is that the push for 'gay marriage rights' is about tolerance, and that any opposition to it is based on bigotry and hatred.

Apparently, being gay means getting a pass on misogyny.   He had no trouble at all telling a female news anchor on 'live' television that he didn't mean Bitch (the B word, for TV) he meant Cunt (the C word, for TV). Sadly he waited until the end of the interview (or perhaps... cue X-Files music!... the interview was ended abruptly once he started on this tack to shut him up...) to drop this bomb so we were denied further interaction between the two.  I have it on good authority that many women have issues with the terms bitch and cunt, particularly as perjoratives and the anchor did seem a might strained as she 'signed off'.

Note that Miss California bent over backwards (in that amusingly vapid way beauty contestents often adopt when they are caught off guard...) to be polite and inoffensive even as she stated her beliefs.  

End Full Stop.

In the wake of the reveal that Miss California hadn't gotten properly vetted for PC views prior to nearly winning the contest (or better yet, disqualified before she hit Miss America... for these views...), there followed not only vast amounts of internet venom against her person, but a rather sordid digging through her past looking for.... something.

What surfaced were professional photographs of a rather cheese cakey flavor. No porn, no embarrassingly nude self portraits or party girl antics (Katie Rees, here's looking at you!)...  

Potentially disqualifying? I don't know. I'm no expert on this, certainly as I haven't watched even a single Miss America pagent in my considerably varied life.  I know that certainly this sort of thing has led to a de-crowning, but I'm unaware of it ever, not even once, coming up for the runner-up, to disqalify them from contesting after the fact.

More importantly however, as the bylaws of the contest are not really important to anyone not involved with the pageant scene, are the cries of hypocracy.

Really now?  I was not aware that gay marriage and bikini pics were of a kind.  Learn something new everyday.  

Seriously: What is the hypocracy of a woman who is willing stand on a stage in a bikini in front of thousands in a contest, and millions watching on TV who is willing to pose on a beach similarly attired?   Seriously: This woman's entire life is more or less consumbed with being looked at as/for being 'pretty'.  

Then surfaced the 'boob job' story.  This is again attached to cries of hypocrit, among other slurs against her character, many implied rather than stated.  Of course no one mentions that it was the beauty pagent people who suggested and paid for the implants. Somehow the contest holders got a pass while the poor little bobblehead had her feet held to the fire...


And here, my friends, is where the story gets interesting. As the professional shots (and some more racy ones I hear... not really caring mind you, but full disclosure and all that... even (gasp!) lingerie) weren't enough to disqualify her from the number two slot in the minds of the Miss America people the anger suddenly turned to a new target. Miss Prejean, mind you, is an easy enough target. She's a bobble head, and not unexpectedly wasn't at all prepared to become the center of a national debate.  

Watch the rats desert a sinking ship? Shanna Moakler, a former contestent (winner?) and one of the permanent judges first jumped up to make an anti-hate, pro gay marriage commercial, then actually resigned as a judge over 'ethical' reasons.

Wait: In twenty plus years of pagentry now she's shocked to learn that the pagent business is... a business?


Here is the thing of it all.

As a gendered species humans need to fuck other humans of the appropriate gender to continue the species.  Procreation. While any given individual opting out of the genepool deliberately is not a crisis, if enough people do it entire viable genetic lines die out, genetic diversity is lost, and if you wish to add a spiritual element to it, ancestral debt is left flapping.  Never mind that when enough people begin trying to adopt baby farming becomes a viable business practice.... a socially acceptable form of human trafficking.

As an intelligent species that is capable of enjoying fucking for the sake of itself, it doesn't really matter where you stick it within reason. Two consenting adults, or a consenting adult and any number of inanimate objects, can do whatever the fuck they like.

Consider Madonna.

Madonna, for those of you who are out of the loop, recently lost her bid to adopt an 'orphan' from Malawi recently.  The child's father was still alive, though apparently an absentee father, and the child had a large number of relatives still alive and in Malawi.  There is some truth to the statement that Madonna, as an extremely wealthy individual, could provide a much better life for the child in question than any number of relatives, even in concert, could.

Of course, by that logic, why even look for an orphan? Seriously: Just wander the streets and villages of Malawi until you find a kid you like and tell HIS parents that you can improve his life by taking him with you to the UK (Madge is still a resident and adoptive citizen, right? I forget after the Ritchie thing...).   This is a real arrogance, a real elitist perspective. Not inaccurate, by any means, but what does it say about us as a people when we start to think this entitles us to take children from their families? Opposition to this adoption did not come from nowhere, but our sympathy lies with Madge.


It all springs from the same root. Selfishness.  

The Gay Marriage crowd doesn't think about it, doesn't want to think about it.  

The human body is facinating, a remarkable creation.  One of its more amazing abilities is its own natural tendancy towards survival based behaviors divorced from the concious mind that controls it.  The human tendancy to overeat, for example, is at odds with our vanity and our desire to live forever, but is designed primarily to keep you alive in lean times, when food is scarce.   While humans are fully capable of enjoying homosexual activities (or autoerotic activities, and ever more bizzare and non-procreative sexual activities...), the human body can, and will, perform even in 'distasteful' circumstances.  While extraordinarily rare and even more rarely reported female on male rapes can occur, the body will respond to stimulus despite the mind.

To return to spirituality: Every gay man and woman has a quarter million years worth of ancestors counting on them to continue spreading their genetic traits that they betray by adopting an attitude that they don't need to sexually reproduce but can instead adopt some other line's child.  Science has given us the ability to largely bypass the need to swallow your pride and 'do the deed', but it is underutilized.

This same selfishness is reflected in the Madonna case.  At some point Madge had the ability to produce her own children. In fact, she did so. Late, mind you, and she paid for it I'm sure.  To her surprise (I assume) she found she liked motherhood for its own sake. I have theories here but they drift overly far.  Possibly she didn't like pregnancy, possibly she waited too long. Now she's essentially stuck with the adoption route to get 'more children'... presumably to keep her busy into her twilight years.


The point of all this, if I must have one, is the shocking behavior towards the otherwise unremarkable Carrie Prejean, and the strange sort of hypocracy it reveals within a certain segment of the population.

It is not acceptable for Miss Prejean to not believe in gay marriage, certainly not and be any sort of celebrity figure at all.   It is, in their terms, hatred and bigotry of the worst sort.

It is not, however, hatred and bigotry to indulge in any manner of attack from the innocous name calling to the actively harmful dirt digging as they look for ways to destroy her credibility as a... christian? pretty woman? spokesperson for the right?

What a fundamental lack of understanding I have of hatred and bigotry!

No, wait...

It is galling to me to suggest, as I must, that the solution to violence is not more violence (it begets yet more violence, as you say...).

Of course that's normally only true if you don't use enough of it!

However, when trying to enact a social agenda (which is based on a selfish, and self destructive perspective failing to look at the larger picture, but that is neither here nor there), it happens to be true.  Unless the gay marriage community is prepared to take up arms and force the entire country to accept, nay ADOPT gay marriage as a norm by force of arms, there is no amount of figurative violence they can use to make people swallow the bitter pill. Its a 'spoon full of sugar'.   Ironically, it is their attempts to destroy Miss Prejean that has made her into whatever spoke's person she has become, has created whatever celebrity she has.   They are creating their own Frankenstien monster to hound them, even as they act to further isolate themselves from the more moderate and unconcerned populace that they should be trying to win over.  They'll never get the stand outs, the die hards... the activists.  

Maybe I should muse on the evolution of american selfishness and the current shape of the culture in how familes are currently interacting.... in another thread.  It does tie to the adoption culture, though from a different angle.

Spike,

 You need a thread title change  - the contest/pageant involved was the Miss USA Pageant , NOT the Miss America pageant.

Miss America is losing money and is practically bankrupt.

Miss USA (the one Prejean competed in) was bought by Donald Trump years ago and he has actually got the ratings to improve for it on national television.


- Ed C.

Although I disagreed with Miss Prejean's stance on gay marriage, I do believe she had every right to stand firm on what she believes.  I was appalled by the treatment she received after the pageant.  I think it was unfair and unprofessional for Perez Hilton to attack in that manner(as far as working for the pageant), and then to have others dig up evidence that would take away her crown was ridiculous.  I know gay marriage is a hot topic out there, but I don't understand its relevance in a beauty pageant.  Either way, I think this was blown way out of proportion.  I could careless who marries whom, if they are consenting adults then let it be.  I just don't care for someone pushing they beliefs or agenda on me.  

Spike: I must say you have a striking and some what confusing mind.  You are one of the most interesting posters I've had the privilege to read. Most of you rants keep me smiling all day!

I find absolutely everyone involved in this "controversy" to be utterly worthless individuals, so its very hard for me to feel sympathy for anyone at all here.

They're all human garbage.

RPGPundit

Let's set aside this nonsense where Spike tries to say that being gay is wacky because everyone wants to reproduce. That's the old "but it's unnatural!" nonsense. And when he tries to say that if we let people be gay we'll end up with more people trafficking, well fuck you Spike. People trafficking comes about because rich people like to exploit poor people, because straight Western guys like to fuck poor Third World women cheap, and because rich people can't be bothered having their own kids. It's got nothing to do with gays. So fuck off with that noise.

The problem with this woman is simple hypocrisy about the "sanctity of marriage." Rabbi Shmuley gets it right.
   "[...]what puzzles me is how she believes that gay marriage would harm the institution of marriage and is anti-Christian but that her posing topless is none of those things.

"Huh? The real danger to marriage in our time is the rampant culture of male womanizing, lack of commitment, and the assault on women’s dignity which treats women as masturbatory material for men. Women who engage in pornographic offerings become complicit in their own degradation and further the male view that a woman is not be respected as an equal but is a means to salacious male ends.

"Miss California also reportedly accepted breast implants for the Miss Universe pageant. Now, aside from the silly relic of beauty pageants still existing in a time when women ought to be appreciated for their minds and not just their legs, surely modeling dissatisfaction with one’s body and implanting foreign objects to enhance one’s perceived physical shortcomings somewhat negates the Christian and spiritual message that beauty is something more than skin deep. Surely, if asked, Jesus would have said that a woman is more than male eye-candy.

"Whether people oppose or support gay marriage, one thing is certain. Since the gay population in the US is approximately ten percent, and the heterosexual divorce rate is about fifty percent, we straight people ought to be blaming ourselves for the destruction of marriage instead of finding scapegoats."
Gays are no threat to straight marriage. We're quite capable of fucking up our own marriages without any help from blokes in arseless chaps and women in comfortable shoes.

What I want to know is, what the fuck has procreation got to do with marriage ?

Regards,
David R

Maybe Spike wants to prohibit infertile people from marrying. It'd be unnatural, after all. Or prohibit contraception? Or oral sex, or masturbation.

And when people get old and can't shag like maniacs any more, still less reproduce, they'd have to get divorced. Because think of the children! who might get trafficked! Or something.

I share the opinion of the Pundit on this. As all the participants in that 'controversy' are worthless wastes of breath, I don't see how any attention should be payed to them.

Wow, cool! Rabbi Shmuley actually wrote a column summarizing exactly what me and my better half were talking about recently! That about sums it up for me. I'd just add that I think that Perez Hilton also is a douchebag who was searching for a fight to show off on his garbage website to begin with, and that's it, folks.

No one better than the other in this crap of a controversy, honestly.

Jimbo, David: My apologies, I forgot that my views on marriage and gays were posted quite some time ago and were probably lost among the whole Jackalope/Cavscout  showdown, which was ongoing at the time, and thus might have been forgotten. I was, after all, musing.


To clarify:  I personally beleive that adults have the right to make anyone their family (in short, marriage, though I view that entirely as a religious issue that should be divorced from legal proceedings all together (seperation of church and state and all that...)).   I don't particularly care much if such familial relationships involve fuckery and all that.  If I want to declare that I think David R is my sworn Blood Brother and that he should have all the legal rights of my own real (imaginary?) brothers, then I should be able to do so (consent, yadda yadda....).

If, by chance, David and I declare our hot sweaty manlove for one another and retire to the back bedroom for same... well that is our business as adults. If, by chance we want some sort of public recognition of our hot sweaty manlove... then things get stickier.  You can't force a private organization (a church) to recognize it using their internal ceremonies against their wishes. I use private here to seperate from public in the sense of government.  Churches have the right to declare their own membership standards and codes of conduct and, regardless of how David and I feel for one another, they have the right to say they don't like it... etc.

How my musings tied to procreation is quite simple:  Sexual preference is just that, a preference.  I, though only a pika, am a strong believer in familial duty.  Gays, regardless of the sort, have a duty to their family and by extension the species (humanity in this case) to pass on those genes they've inherited as best they can.  In my favorite metaphor for sexuality, they need to eat the chocolate ice cream even though they prefer the strawberry.  Now, a hundred years ago they needed to get all sweaty, these days they have the option to go the nifty sciency route but there are two problems with that that I forsee:

First:  always comes the issue of the right of the donor genetic material to determine how the product of their genes are raised. This is far more important with regard to male homosexual couples, as they must rely not only on a genetic donor but ALSO a surrogate womb, who will frequently find the 9 months or so of womb duty somewhat more personal that simply spraying into a cup... obviously giving away ones rights is somewhat implied, but it will remain a sticky issue for a long time.

Secondly:  Attraction is more than simply a statement of preference, as far as I can tell, but actually a genetic imperetive to find a compatable donor.  This can, and I assume will lead to sub-optimal pairings. As our culture continues to look at homosexual preference a binary state, despite the public adoption of the Kinsey scale, homosexual individuals will refuse, for cultural reasons, to consider looking for genetic donors that they might 'get jiggy with' if they hadn't opted for gayness.  

Of course, you might suggest that most pairings in history were done without regards to preference (arranged marriage, political marrage and the like) and I reply with: Naturally, and look how that worked out for the Hapsburgs.  

Obviously we can attempt an ad hoc arrangement: Find genetic donors who look similar to your preferred partner, or better yet are related to your partner; or we can wait for science to give us the ability to mate sperm to sperm and egg to egg, which seems feasable.

The current cultural norm, however, is to take the easy way out and simply adopt, which allows the biologically incompatable couple to 'have kids' while ignoring the imperative genetic reasons to 'have kids'.

Venosha:  Thanks, I'm here all week!   I'll give you a hint: Coffee makes me sleepy.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;303585Maybe Spike wants to prohibit infertile people from marrying. It'd be unnatural, after all. Or prohibit contraception? Or oral sex, or masturbation.

And when people get old and can't shag like maniacs any more, still less reproduce, they'd have to get divorced. Because think of the children! who might get trafficked! Or something.

Jimbo: Fuck you too, mate.  You have failed your reading comprehension check, and I don't think I made it THAT hard.

I've repeatedly pointed out that people can enjoy whatever sex they like for the funs of it.  Including autoerotic fuckery and enjoying inanimate objects... in the very musing you are commenting on, thus presumably you bothered to read.  

Regardless of how you enjoy yourself, you have a duty to do sex for procreation at some point, and ideally more than just once... just to be on the safe side.  Waiting until one is old and infertile is just as bad as saying 'but I prefer shoes!' or 'I prefer sexing myself up' or 'I prefer homosexuality'.

Fuck your preference and breed motherfucker.

Full disclosure: as of about six or seven years ago I changed stances from the Neg Pop growth crowd to my current position of 'breed motherfuckers'. The reasons for my original and current positions did not fundamentally change, only my understanding of circumstance.  I still contend that there are far too many of you hairless fuckers for one measley planet, but I had forgotten that population pressures drive expansion more than anything else. Get the fuck off of my Earth, rather than 'stop overbreeding on my Earth', if you will.  THe first is good for humanity, the second is good for me. I'm nothing if not an altruist.

This might be a tad silly - but the title is really bothering me .

 It was The Miss USA Pageant folks, NOT the Miss America Pageant that was involved in the controversy story.

SO, Spike,....this means you are all in favor of Space colonies on the moon and Mars then ? - you know to make sure people get up and off the planet and all that kind of stuff?


- Ed C.

I wanted to understand the Pika philosophy in all its baroque grotesque but the prose is tying knots with my neurons. Does anybody have a translation in mortal language ?

Koltar: Yup.  I think that intelligence is partly an effort on terrestial life, as a whole, to eliminate the fragility of existing on/in one ecosphere.  We are meant, if you don't mind the anthropomorphizing of evolution, to get the hell off the ball and 'out there'.

Sadly, us Pika's are too few and uncooperative to accomplish this, so we are forced to cultivate humanity to do our science stuff for us.


Boulet:  Its simple: humans (and pikas) are animals and should do animal things, like fuck and kill and eat as necessary for survival of species and individual, using intelligence to support and overcome their animal natures with the same overall goal.

Quote from: RPGPundit;303539I find absolutely everyone involved in this "controversy" to be utterly worthless individuals, so its very hard for me to feel sympathy for anyone at all here.

They're all human garbage.

RPGPundit

Though I am loath to pursue the trend of multiposting:

This. In essence I generally agree with this sentiment, if not the particular expression.  The (generally weak) attempts by the 'Right' to push Miss Prejean into the spotlight as a target... I mean spokesperson (how DO they do that strikeout thing.... bah!) are just as guilty as the 'tolerance' crowd throwing their filth, while the various pagent people trying to CYA in various ways... fie on them too.

Sadly simply stating it so boldly doesn't inspire discussion.