The Miss USA pageant isn’t something I generally find myself tuning into, but my DVR recorded it last night due to Kings moving to Saturday night. Out of morbid curiosity, I skipped around the recording until I got to the question and answer section. Miss California, or Carrie Prejean, was asked by pageant judge Perez Hilton, a popular blogger, if she thought same-sex marriage should be made legal in all 50 states. Here is her response in full:
Well I think it’s great that Americans are able to choose one or the other. We live in a land that you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage. And you know what, in my country, and my family, I believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman. No offense to anybody out there, but that’s how I was raised and that’s how that I think it should be between a man and a woman.
The controversy that her answer generated seems to be focussed on the second half of her answer. I interpret that half as having to do with her religious beliefs, to which she is certainly entitled. Yet this seems to be the only part of her answer that the media is quoting.
The indisputably wrong part of Ms. Prejean’s answer is the first half, that “Americans are able to choose” same-sex marriage. This is only at most 5% true: the 2000 census populations of the states that allow same-sex marriage (Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont and Iowa) divided by the population of the U.S. is 0.047.
I suppose that in one sense, the religious sense, it is true. Religious entities are free to choose who they marry. That’s a fundamental right guaranteed by the freedom of exercise clause of the First Amendment. However, in the legal sense, the vast majority of states do not recognize marriages of same-sex couples. It is the legal sense that Mr. Hilton’s question explicitly pertained to.
Despite being factually wrong, the first half of Ms. Prejean’s answer suggests that she actually favors the legalization of same-sex marriage, calling the ability to choose “great.” I wonder if her rather bipolar response reflects America’s confusion over this issue. Many Americans probably don’t grasp that there are rights and benefits denied to gay couples who would be married if legally allowed and purely see the issue through a religious lens. If they truly understood that rights were being denied, then they’d have to come to the same conclusion as John Hodgman, that “opposition to gay marriage has no logical foundation in a civil society that is premised on equality.”