Equality California announced Thursday that it would be airing a spot featuring a teenage girl with two mothers during the Nov. 22 contest, which is airing on the CW and My Network TV.

Keith Lewis, the pageant’s executive director, says he would give Prejean the same amount of time if she wanted to provide a pre-taped message.

Lewis, who is gay, accused Prejean of violating her contract when she ignored his advice on how to handle the intense publicity after she said during this year’s Miss USA pageant that she was opposed to same-sex marriage.

Fun week, no?

On the one hand we’ve got Carrie Prejean, whose 15 minutes of fame feel longer than “The English Patient,” throwing a temper tantrum on “Larry King Live” for King’s audacity to ask a legitimate question about her choices in the wake of a sex tape scandal.

And on the other, we’ve got Will Phillips, the 10-year old boy who refused to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance because he believes this country doesn’t treat gays and lesbians with “justice for all.”

Sometimes, I think God is a playwright at heart.

Prejean’s story has played out like a 60’s Bedroom farce with operatic dimensions — a dramatic moment of confrontation on national television (yeah it was a beauty pageant, and yeah Perez Hilton was her adversary, but still), a firestorm of media coverage in the wake, Prejean painting herself in the role of virtuous God-fearing woman trampled by the Big Bad Gays, half-naked pictures of her looking sort of slutty on rocks, a memoir (of course!) about the ordeal marketed to Christian conservatives, then the bombshell revelation that there are sexually explicit videos of her floating around.

Fabulous.

(And does anyone else enjoy that Carrie Prejean, who’s essentially spun celebrity out of her own narcissism, is the only celeb whose sex tape scandal doesn’t involve another person on camera with her? Always hogging the spotlight.)

Then, unexpectedly, along comes Will. Lovely, wise, understated, young Will, who in a simple gesture spoke more eloquently and powerfully than Prejean did in her entire book (called “Still Standing,” incidentally. Is she serious?). You can’t really accuse a 10-year old boy of having a political agenda or plans for a book tour, so our Will was simply doing something he believed was right. And I’m with him on this one: I want our flag to represent a country that really does what it promises.

The Will Phillips story isn’t a game-changer. It’s a lovely reminder of what standing up for your principles looks like (and it doesn’t hurt that it came from a 10-year old boy — way to make us adults look like spineless jellyfish, huh?). It would be wrong of us to make Phillips into anything more than a morale booster for the movement: he’s not a sign that sweeping generational changes have taken place, but if he becomes a lawyer, we have to recruit this kid to be a vocal leader for us!

The playwright in me would love to see this as the next scene in the play: Carrie Prejean and Will Phillips get a chance to meet. The face of a hypocritical, judgmental and narcissistic movement hell-bent on fostering inequality looks into the eyes of a ten-year old boy who stood up for equality without the promise of gain for himself.

“So, what are you famous for?” he’ll ask Prejean.

She’ll sputter and regurgitate some standard line about being persecuted for speaking her beliefs and her faith. But Phillips will see past the B.S and hear the voice in her most secret soul tell the truth.

“I’m famous being a hypocrite, which essentially means I’m famous for nothing.”

Phillips won’t judge her. If she’s even half-serious about her faith in God, she’ll get judged in time.

In the scene I’d write for them, they’re at an event where the Pledge will get spoken. And Prejean will throw her hand up to her heart and ramble the words off, putting up a good show for the cameras, not really listening to what she’s saying. And maybe she’ll glance over at Phillips, who’ll just be standing there, listening intently to the words and saying some little personal prayer-wish that the promise of the words will one day be fulfilled, and maybe she’ll get it. In a flash of understanding, she’ll get it, get what conviction and truth and integrity looks like, and the hand over her heart will feel it beat a little faster. It’s what happens when you’re surging with regret.

Probably not. But one can hope.

I promised not to waste any more space on Carrie Prejean unless it was discovered her parents were Dom DeLuise and Billie Holiday. Unfortunately that background is just a silly dream. Feel free to call me a liar.

There is lots of pearls clutching over Prejean and her “scandal.” As mentioned before, why anyone cares what she thinks on any topic is beyond my understanding.  And former Miss California does herself little good when she throws a hissy fit during an interview, but after commercial continues to kiss  the wrinkled booty of the same interviewer who “insulted” her precious honor. She is an immature girl.

I was hoping for some more backbone about her sex tape (yes that’s asking for a lot, but as a Mets fan I live on hope). Calling it  “the biggest mistake” of her life is the type of overblown rhetoric little girls are known for. Prejean should have acted like a grown up,  said she was horny at the time, her boy was feeling the same, but she didn’t want to get pregnant. This was a safe alternative and young girls need to know they are not required to do the nasty if they don’t want to. Finally anyone getting bent out of shape needs to hush  because when it comes to matters of the loins, to be an American is to be a hypocrite. Didn’t Hawthorne make that clear?

If she had said that, the interviewers would have passed out, the Christian Right imploded, and I would have started a “Prejean for Mayor” write in campaign.

Prejean told Fox News on Monday and NBC’s “Today” show on Tuesday that she shot the X-rated video of herself alone when she was 17 and sent it to a boyfriend.

The 22-year-old tells NBC: “It was for private use, but does that justify what I did? No. It was the biggest mistake of my life.”

Prejean was fired in June. She believes she lost her crown because of her opposition to gay marriage. Pageant organizers said she was skipping official events.

Earlier this month, Prejean and organizers reached a confidential settlement. She tells NBC that she has suffered “a campaign against me to try to silence me.”

A joint statement released Tuesday says Prejean and the organizers of the pageant reached a confidential settlement on dueling lawsuits.

Prejean sued Miss California USA organizers in August for libel, slander and religious discrimination. She accused them of telling her to stop mentioning God even before her controversial remarks against gay marriage.

Prejean was fired in June after pageant officials accused her of missing events, an allegation that she denied. The pageant countersued Prejean last month.

The statement says Prejean and the pageant “wish each other the best in their future endeavors.”

The next Miss California USA will be crowned Nov. 22.

So all porn is essentially gay (yeah, not only are we responsible for Titan men [further digression, not that it's such a bad thing, you know], but we’re also apparently responsible for midget porn and “Girls Gone Wild” and unattractive heterosexual couples making mediocre amateur porn on XTube).

I know that’s a bit much for a Wednesday. Sorry. At least I waited until after lunch.

And Carrie Prejean won’t go away. God keeps telling her to give press conferences. (Seriously, shouldn’t He be more invested in other things, like poverty and war and famine? Not Carrie Prejean. How did she get his direct line? Or is someone just messing with her, faking a booming voice over their cell phone and having major laughs with a bitchy friend at a Starbucks in Orange County?) She and Maggie Gallagher still keep popping up unexpectedly during my daily blog reads, Gallagher in that purple suit, looking up at an apparently very tall cameraman, standing in front of a bush that needs pruning, do you think she grew that herself or is that the handiwork of a gardener or a neighbor?

And there never seems to be an end to the rambling discursive rant of opposition to everything Gay (not little-g gay but big-G Gay, they’re different), because Gay things are powerful things, hulking agents of destruction, Gay things and Gay people and Gay marriages are apparently the weapons of mass destruction Bush failed to find in Iraq, because the Gay can not only steal children from heterosexual lives but it can bring down the whole of Western civilization, toppling Wal-Marts across the Midwest with a withering glance and ending “Everybody Loves Raymond” reruns forever.

A quote, if I may.

“The only politics than can survive an encounter with this world, and still speak convincingly of freedom and justice and democracy, is a politics that encompass both the harmonies and the dissonance.”
 
That’s Tony Kushner, from an essay called “American Things,” from his book of essays, Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness.
 
We’re quite used to the dissonance, aren’t we?
 
We spend a lot of our time thinking about the longstanding problems of that dissonance; we feel the repercussions of it every day. The public discourse (not discourse, really. Argument. The public argument, because it’s not talking dispassionately about ideas, it’s yelling, shrieking, tantrums and torrents, emotion, not reason, theatrics, not ethics) about our rights has become about how different we are – our relationships, our families, our beliefs, our belief systems, our proclivities, our perversions (we have them, fess up!, everyone does, no need to pretend we don’t), our identities, our lives.

They argue that our difference justifies our inequity. We argue that our difference shouldn’t matter.
 
(Or we argue that our differences make us who we are and we should celebrate them, glorify them, writhe in them naked in the middle of the street, and while I respect diversity of opinion, that option makes me little uncomfortable, I am a small town boy, after all, and I was taught not let your difference go wagging out in everyone’s faces).
 
This moment we’re living in is an interesting moment. It feels like a moment of great change, a moment where a skin is shed and a new one takes its place, where an old order falls and a new one forms, where old ideas make way for new ones, and if there was ever a time for our community to embrace change within itself, it seems like now is as good a moment as any.
 
We’ve spent the first forty years of our public struggle working to carve a space in the world for our difference to exist. Now, it seems we need to carve a space in the world for that difference to become irrelevant.
 
All the things we’re fighting for – marriage equality, employment non-discrimination, the end of DADT, hate crimes legislation, and the rest – all hinges upon a single, elegant notion: our difference does not outrank our role as citizen of this country, and our laws should reflect that commonality, not the difference.
 
American-ness trumps gayness.
 
Just as American-ness trumped blackness, woman-ness, Christian-ness, and whatever -ness you can think of that we’ve labeled a protected class. What links us is more important than what divides us.
 
The harmonies are more important than the dissonances.
 
As a community, we’ve done a pretty good job of finding a way for the harmonies and dissonances to coexist, and in the mingling (the sometimes painful, bruising mingling) many of us have built lives that are essentially different, yet oddly the same as everyone else. We’re living the politics we need to shout in the streets.
 
The question of gay rights isn’t a minority question. It’s an American question.

Conservatives need to come up with better theories, especially when the topic is sexuality. As most of you know the Values Summit happened this past weekend (the attendees went gaga over Ms. Prejean). Michael Schwartz, chief of staff for Sen. Tom Coburn, held a session on the evils of pornography. Here is what he opined:

“All pornography is homosexual pornography,” said Schwartz, repeating what an ex-gay friend told him, “because all pornography turns your sexual drive inwards.”

You read right. According to Schwartz’s ex-gay friend (we all know that queen is at the sex club with his booty in the air….not that there is anything wrong with that) all porn is touched with the homosexuality. But hold on peoples because it gets better. Schwartz is convinced one way to keep 11 year old boys from loving show tunes is by telling them Dad’s Playboy will transform them into sodomites.

“And if you tell an 11-year-old boy about that, do you think he’s going to want to get a copy of ‘Playboy’?” he said. “I’m pretty sure he’ll lose interest. That’s the last thing he wants!”

I hate children, but I know this much: Playboy’s hold on the imaginations of 11 year old boys is tenuous at best. When was that magazine last relevant? Forty years ago?

While I’m ranting, this is problem 423 about minority life. The majority will always point to some goofiness uttered by a tribe member (good morning Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson) to uphold their bigotry. Who better else to quote than some “ex-gay” nitwit for the juicy dirt on gay living?

Rachel started us off with highlights from the Values Voter Summit 2009, and wow, does it look like a humdinger.

In case you were wondering which values you should be voting for (Spoilers!), it’s gays bad, czars bad, and independent women scary and bad unless they are hot enough to be former minor beauty queens or on Fox News.

Speaking of minor beauty queens, get ready for ousted Miss California Carrie Prejean, the hit of the day.

What makes a true beauty queen is inner beauty. And apparently in Carrie Prejean’s world what makes inner beauty is a sense of entitlement that would make Marie Antoinette pull you aside and ask you to take it down a notch.

Ms. Prejean is also doing that trendy thing where prejudiced people try to grab the mantle of victimhood and claim that they are discriminated against when people aren’t “tolerant” of them spouting their intolerance all over the place.

It’s like they learned the superficial lesson that it’s bad to be a bigot, but have managed to completely gloss over the bigger lesson of what exactly a bigot is.

Anyway, Rachel openly mocks her in this clip. Enjoy.

Dear Carrie Prejean’s Publicity Agency: You might want to mention to your client that extolling your own “courage and bravery” is bad form.

Also, I keep hearing that conservatism is about personal responsibility. Why hasn’t Prejean taken responsibility for the fact that, politics aside, her answer stank on ice? She didn’t give any reasons for her belief, and her lead-in was so confusing that at first I thought she was trying to say that gay marriage wasn’t for her, but she was glad others were getting the choice.

Why has she never, not once, addressed the possibility that Miss North Carolina USA simply kicked her ass and won fair and square? Nice sportsmanship, Sneerface.

One More Thing:

You know who else Values Voters don’t like? Reporters. Way to get weird and paranoid, kids.

Going South

Speaking of Values Voters, Rachel revisited her story from earlier in the week pointing out that South Carolina’s Family Values candidates don’t seem to care about your health if you’re not rich and no longer a fetus.

Rachel welcomed the terrific Eugene Robinson from The Washington Post to talk about whether some old attitudes about race and poverty might have something to do with the state’s depressing health statistics.

Ms. Information

Rachel reported that a new political party is in control in Japan for the first time since 1955. The new Justice Minister is against the death penalty, and since she’s the one who has to sign off on executions, it looks like they won’t be having any for a while.

Rachel noted that this makes us the only industrialized nation that will still be executing prisoners, in addition to being the only industrialized nation that doesn’t offer health care to its citizens.

Come visit the USA! It’s like one giant coast-to-coast Thunderdome!

Rachel also gave us an intriguing account of the new political horserace between Republican Governors Tim Pawlenty (Minnesota) and Bobby Jindal (Louisiana).

They’re both trying to look like tough leaders, which apparently means it’s a race to the bottom of the base.

Both previously took strong stands against taking the Federal stimulus money before Santaing it out all over their states.

Recently Pawlenty has forbidden his state to give any money to ACORN, which already wasn’t happening, but now it’s really extra not happening. Jindal, not to be outdone, signed an executive order to stop the ACORN money that his state wasn’t giving out, which makes it extra super-duper not happening.

I am really looking forward to seeing this slapfight continue. C’mon fellas! Who’s going to be the first to implement tough penalties for breaking the law of gravity? And somebody nard up and demand an end to funding those state unicorn preserves!

Raising L

Hey! Looks like the libruls are no longer gelatin-based!

Jane Hamsher of firedoglake.com joined Rachel to talk about working towards real health care reform by scaring the bejeezus out of the conservadems.

Enjoy that doghouse you’re in, Blue Dogs! You earned it.

I think it’s interesting that the blunder that Jane Hamsher points out – supporting the conservadems with the mistaken idea that they’d fall in line with the rest of the party – is essentially the same one the Big Tent republicans made when the fiscal conservatives started courting the hard-line morals conservatives.

And now thinking conservatives seem to have been left flat-footed while the Republicans who are screaming about secession and bad, scary gays have taken over. We should maybe learn from that.

Political Football

You may not be aware of this since everybody’s been so quiet about it, but football season has started!

Rachel and staff decided to check out OpenSecrets.org to see which NFL teams may be breaking your heart off the field as well as on.

Sports savant (and TRMS producer) Bill Wolff stopped by to break the bad news and introduce you to a disco fight song that will make you hate your ears.

You have been warned.

Carrie Prejean will publish a memoir called “Still Standing.” Conservative book house Regnery  Publishing said Monday that it will release the book.

Prejean believes her crown was taken because she said she opposed gay marriage. California pageant executive director Keith Lewis has said that Prejean was skipping Miss California USA events while speaking out against gay marriage at unsanctioned appearances.

Prejean was replaced by the Miss California pageant’s first runner-up, Tami Farrell. Farrell has also said she believes marriage should be between a man and a woman.

Writing about Perez Hilton, the dirty mouth of Hollywood, makes me want to shower to get the grime off. So this is it for me. Unless I hear Hilton is producing a bio-pic on Lester Young, I’m finished. While he likes to be the center of any party, his ego will not suffer from my embargo. People know the name Perez Hilton. You only say mine  if you are looking for fries with your meal.

Hilton got a good cover spread in the most recent Advocate. He talks about his affinity with Madonna and Oprah, his run-in with Will.I.Am  how much he despises dishonesty, that his calling is a civil rights leader(!) blah, blah, blah. When  he talks about the aftermath of the Toronto drama, Hilton offers platitudes that would shame any self respecting Lifetime movie writer.

“But what’s come out of all of this is that I’ve learned so much about myself, and I’m in a much better place. I’m actually thankful that it happened. As cheesy as it may sound, I had almost a spiritual moment when I just let all of the anger and worry go and am now filled with peace, happiness, and wisdom.”

Aside from that drippy and silly mess, Hilton also says he wanted to call Will.I.Am something else.

“I thought about calling him the n word, but I thought the f word was even worse. I was so filled with hate at that moment because I was hated on so much, and I reacted in the worst way possible.”

So instead of nigger, Hilton went for faggot? Jeesh, is there a reason to even be surprised? This is a guy who is certain calling Carrie Prejean a female dog has nothing to do with his sexism because he just adores women. Short history lesson Ms. Hilton: America gave gold medalist Jesse Owens a ticker-tape parade when he returned from Munich in 1936, but he still had to sit in the back of the bus. I have this silly habit of looking for more than bigoted taunting from someone who considers his vocation civil rights. I can get name calling from a few  Chicago t-shirts thank you very much.

This “thinking”should not  surprise coming from a guy who just wants to be sure his name is mentioned. Well I’ve done it for the last time.