If I Were A Beauty Queen

Well, things would be strange, indeed. One would expect that the Mad Hatter would rush in at any moment, Alice would take a pill and grow into a giant, and the Queen of Hearts would recite her all-too-familiar mantra, “Off with his head.”

And headless I should be, if I were to merely enter a beauty contest, much less be crowned something or other.

I thought I would escape comment on Carrie Prejean – Miss California, and runner-up in the Miss USA pageant – but with ongoing revelations of the “windy day” photos from earlier in her career, the story just keeps on going, like a risqué Energizer Bunny®.

Most everyone should be familiar by now with the question that the contestant judge – Perez Hilton – asked Prejean about “gay marriage.” Another state had decided to permit it, so what did she think? Prejean indicated that she was pleased that our civic arrangements permit people choose to engage in such rites, but that her rearing taught her that God desired marriage to be between one woman and one man. Prejean did fairly well, I thought, for a 21-year-old. (How has she responded since then to the fawning Christian community and the ‘windy day’ photos? Not so much.)

So, I wondered what I would have said to such a question. At the age of 21, I probably would have said something coarse and completely unbiblical. So, I rejected what would have been the indiscretions of my youth and wondered what I would have said now.

Put aside, if possible, the image you might be having of a 41-year-old male beauty contestant, “drummer extraordinaire” or not.

You must know that I am an ardent traditionalist, in the sense that I believe God designed and gave to us the marriage relationship, and that any given marriage should be between one man and one woman. Given recent scientific developments and medical advances (see Al Mohler’s article about gender confusion), I should probably say that marriage should be between one-who-has-always-been-a-man and one-who-has-always-been-a-woman, not in the man-trapped-in-a-woman’s-body sense, but in the Garden of Eden sense, fig leaves and all.

I am, also, an ardent federalist, not in the sense that all power should be concentrated in a central government (as in ‘the Feds’), but in the 10th Amendment sense that these United States retain power not explicitly granted by the Constitution to the government in Washington, D.C. (see, e.g., the Federalist Society and the Tenth Amendment Center). Local groups of citizens (the States) are better able to reflect their moral consensus than bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. If, for example, my fellow citizens in Alabama decided to permit ‘gay marriage,’ and if I felt strongly enough about it, I should be able to move to Arizona, where they don’t. The beauty of the U.S. system is that not all States are required to do and believe the same things.

(Some years back a couple of law school friends and I were discussing a federal judge’s ruling that Alabama must remove the Ten Commandments display from the State Courthouse. They simply accepted – as undisputed historical truth – that the central government could order a State what to do with its own property. When I suggested that the Alabama governor ignore the order, they were incredulous. This attitude that the central government is sovereign over all issues is part of the cause for many of our problems today.)

So, my response to Perez Hilton’s question might have gone something like this:

“The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, whom I serve in the Lord Jesus Christ, gave mankind the institution of marriage as a gift to enjoy and as the means by which we populate the earth, and he instructed us that it is to be between one man and one woman. However, the United States is not the kingdom of Christ, and the citizens of the several States should be free to determine this issue as their respective faiths and consciences dictate.

“My hope would be that as God draws men to himself, prompting them to repent of sin and turn to righteousness in Christ, that my fellow citizens would determine this issue in a way that glorifies God.”

Come to think of it, if I gave this answer, Perez Hilton might have said nasty things about me, too, and someone would have inevitably dredged up some “windy day” photos of me.