You had to know I was going to comment on this- I have a tag for it and everything!

By now all of you have probably heard the controversy over Carrie "Miss California" Prejean's claim that she was denied the Miss USA crown because she doesn't support gay marriage. Specifically, in response to a question asking whether gay marriage should be legal in every state she said:

I think it's great that Americans are able to choose one or the other," Prejean responded. "But in my country, and in my family, I think that 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."

Now, I don't want to take sides on this issue. Really, I don't. I support gay marriage, as a matter of fact, but also think that imposing a political litmus test on beauty pageant contestants is fairly stupid. For that matter I think beauty pageants are fairly stupid, but that's not the point. No, what I want to do today is twofold: (1) post a picture of a woman in skimpy clothing and (2) talk about a deeper issue with her answer.



Okay, now that we have that out of the way, let's deal with my second issue. During later discussion of her answer, Prejean added this:

"I don't take back what I said," she told Lauer, adding that she "had spoken from my heart, from my beliefs and for my God."

"It's not about being politically correct," she said. "For me, it's about being biblically correct." [emphasis added]

Basically, for her, marriage is whatever the bible says marriage is, right? Well then, I think she's in for an interesting discovery if she actually reads the bible attentively. I say this because the bible seems to recognize eight types of marriage and some of them might strike us as a little... odd. One of them is more or less what we think of as "traditional" (i.e. one man, one woman) but the other seven include "polygynous marriage" in which a man has multiple wives, "levirate marriage," in which a widow with no sons by her husband must marry her brother-in-law, and my personal favorite "marriage between a woman and her rapist," because a woman who suffers sexual assault must then marry her assaulter lest she be judged a slut or something.

So, hey, I don't want to lecture the beauty queen runner-up or nothing, but you might want to be careful with that whole "biblically correct" thing. It can be a whole mess of trouble.*


* And this, as a side note, illustrates a central problem with using the bible as an authority. If you use the whole thing- literally- then you run into a wide variety of problems, including that much of it is mind-bogglingly self-contradictory. If you pick and choose, however, how the hell do you decide what's "the word of god" versus "plain old crazy?" This isn't to say that Christians shouldn't use the bible for inspiration or something, but someone whose morality actually does come from the bible would probably be judged criminally violent by modern standards.