Equality California has had a rough go of it over the past few years. First, they were accused of messing up the Proposition 8 campaign, then they were chastised for deciding to wait until 2012 to challenge the marriage ban. But they certainly made the right decision when they chose to accept Miss California’s offer of 30 seconds of free ad time during the televised pageant this Sunday.

The group will be airing a touching little montage of a teenage girl and her two moms. It’s not too cheesy, won’t bring a tear to your eye, but it gets the job done.

The point is not really the ad, though.

Pageants are a phenomenon in all sorts of places where being gay is a serious problem. Beauty contests are important to parts of the country that never are exposed to the issue of homosexuality. We saw this during the first Prejean uproar – people were outraged that the pageant even addressed issues of sexuality at all. And that controversy did raise awareness, but it did so without much control over the message. We had Perez Hilton on our side ( not exactly a veteran gay rights spokesperson) and they had Miss Prejean (a complete dud as far as anyone can tell and certainly after the Larry King incident).

This time, that same audience (and maybe more given the news coverage) will see the issue of gay marriage as presented by a large, experienced advocacy organization. Finally, a spokesperson we can beleive in.

Sunday will be a moment, as in any campaign, where control is taken back, the issue is reframed and the agenda is refocused. If we are going to have that moment, best to have it in front of an audience that is more conservative, more sheltered and less supportive than the general population of San Francisco.

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.”

I had really been missing me some Prejean.

About a month ago, reports circulated that the former Miss California was looking to file a discrimination suit against the Miss California organization. Then everyone quickly scurried away into mediation and I worried that we would never get the juicy details of their conflict.

Well, I was wrong. The only person who seems to have disappeared in Donald Trump (not named in the suit perhaps because he settled in the interim months). Because yesterday it was all over Twitter that Prejean has actually filed her suit and named the corporation in charge of Miss California along with Moakler, Lewis and their publicist.

The best part is that she is claiming religious discrimination and charging that Moakler and Lewis conspired with Perez Hilton to discriminate against her for her christian beliefs.

The suit will likely go nowhere. The damage caused to Prejean’s career a) is likely not really considered damage since it catapulted her profile in the American pop scene and b) was also likely causally related to her comments and the reaction they garnered from the public rather than the fact that the Miss California people fired her for refusing to appear at events. But the suit will bring her much publicity just in time for her upcoming book.

The conclusion: every time this woman opens her mouth she does damage to that part of American politics that pretends to be decent and rational and still believes that gay marriage is a travesty. She is a polarizing figure at a time when it would help to have people choose sides. And… she’s really entertaining.

Welcome back Carrie!

Court records show Prejean sued California pageant executive director Keith Lewis and actress and former Miss USA Shanna Moakler in Los Angeles on Monday.

Prejean was fired in June by pageant officials, who cited missed scheduled appearances.

Prejean’s attorney says that’s not true and his client was ousted because of controversial remarks in April during the Miss USA pageant that marriage should be between a man and a woman.

Representatives for Lewis and Moakler said they had no public comment yet on the lawsuit.

Her lawsuit claims they told Prejean to stop mentioning God.

Prejean told Matt Lauer on NBC’S “Today” show Friday that she “absolutely” had been dethroned because of the comment, when she said marriage should be between a man and a woman.

Prejean lost her title Wednesday after the California pageant’s executive director said Prejean was skipping Miss California USA events while speaking out against gay marriage at unsanctioned appearances.

Prejean denied that and calls her firing a set up. She says “tolerance needs to be a two-way street.”

Prejean was replaced by the Miss California pageant’s first runner-up, Miss Malibu Tami Farrell.

Yesterday, Carrie Prejean, poster child for the National Organization for Marriage and the newly conservative California, was fired.

When told of her firing by the celebrity radio host Billy Bush, Prejean insisted it was because of her answer to Perez Hilton’s gay marriage question during the pageant: “”It’s just because of my answer, I think. None of this would be happening right now if I just said, ‘Yeah, gays should get married. You’re right Perez Hilton.’”

If only that were true.

The press release issues by the Miss California and Miss Universe organizations states that the firing is, “based solely on contract violations including Ms. Prejean’s unwillingness to make appearances on behalf of the Miss California USA Organization.” Since Prejean maintained her crown after the nude pictures surfaced and after Shanna Moakler resigned in protest, it is unlikely that her answer in the original pageant is the root of this dismissal.

And that’s the problem.

I know California is a great disappointment to progressive and liberal minded people everywhere, and polls show it’s split down the middle on issues of gay rights, but having someone who holds bigoted and discriminatory views as a figure head for a state is unacceptable.

Sure, at the end of the day, the right girl is now Miss California. But the decision was made too late and for the wrong reasons. In the same way that racism is not tolerated in world of celebrity and politics (when it is recognized, mind you), homophobia should not be appropriate for those appointed to “represent” a state or community.

I’m thriled to see the end of Prejean (please let this be the end of Prejean), but expect better from the Miss Universe corporation (yes, I have expectations of a beauty pagenat business).

Trump issued a statement Wednesday saying he sacked Prejean for failing to honor her commitments as Miss California USA.

Pageant officials say Tami Farrell, the first runner-up to Prejean in the Miss California USA competition, will take over those responsibilities.

Prejean created controversy during the Miss USA competition, where she was first runner-up, when she answered a judge’s question about gay marriage by saying marriage should be reserved for men and women.

I say “shocking” even though I personally wasn’t surprised. One of my best friends is from rural Tennessee. His alma mater still segregates superlatives: White Most Likely to Succeed, Black Most Likely to Succeed; Funniest White, Funniest Black, and so on.

The white students quoted in the Times article expressed some reservations about the practice, but generally concluded with “It’s how it’s always been…It’s just a tradition.” In the words of Harley Boone, a platinum blond girl with beauty-queen looks who co-chaired last year’s white prom, “It doesn’t seem like a big deal around here. It’s just what we know and what our parents have done for so many years.”

“It’s just what we know.” Miss Boone reminded me of another beauty queen, in both her appearance and her comment: Miss California USA Carrie Prejean.

Miss Prejean, you’ll recall, when asked her beliefs about marriage equality, responded (in part), “I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman. No offense to anybody out there, but that’s how I was raised.”

How I was raised. Tradition. What our parents have done. This is not, in itself, a bad reason for doing something. It explains why I set the table the way I do, for instance, or why I always put an extra unlit candle on a birthday cake (”good luck for the next year,” my mom always told me). It explains, too, more substantial practices—how we gather, celebrate milestones, express joy, or mourn loss. No generation does, or should, invent everything from scratch.

And yet, sometimes “what we know”—or thought we knew—stops working, or never worked very well in the first place.

I used to load the dishwasher with the forks tines down—because that’s how my parents did and still do it—until I realized they get cleaner tines up (in my dishwasher, anyway, and please don’t send me irate e-mails if yours is different).

Spotty forks are one thing. Racial and sexual inequality are quite another. When traditions cause palpable harm to people, it’s time to change. At that point, rethinking tradition is not merely optional, as in the dishwasher case—it’s morally mandatory.

And that’s why Prejean’s ” how I was raised” comment struck so many of us as a dumb answer. No educated person can justifiably claim ignorance of the challenges gay individuals and couples face. We gays are deprived of a fundamental social institution, treated unequally in the eyes of the law, and told that our deep, committed, loving relationships are inferior, counterfeit, or depraved. In the face of such injustice, “that’s how I was raised” sounds hollow and cowardly.

There are those who bristle at any analogy between homophobia and racial injustice. Indeed, a favorite new right-wing strategy is to claim that liberals unfairly label as “bigots” anyone who opposes same-sex marriage, even on the basis of sincere moral and religious convictions.

But that’s one reason why the analogy is so powerful, and so revealing. It shows that citing “sincere moral and religious convictions” doesn’t get one a free pass for maintaining unjust institutions.

No analogy compares two things that are exactly the same. (That would not be an analogy, but an identity.) Analogies compare two or more things that are similar in some relevant respect(s). The similarities can be instructive.

The white citizens of Montgomery County, Georgia, seem like a nice enough bunch. They don’t carry pitchforks or wear hooded robes. I doubt that Miss Boone ever uses the n-word, although her grandparents probably do. (Mine did, too, until we grandchildren protested loudly enough.) They are otherwise decent folk misled by powerful tradition.

I’m sure that, pressed for further explanation, many of these folks could make the right noises about doing what’s best for their children and eventual grandchildren. And much like “that’s just what we know,” that response would sound familiar. Opponents of marriage equality use it constantly.

But don’t marriage-equality opponents have social-science data backing them up? They don’t. Yes, they have data about how children fare in fatherless households, for example, and then they extrapolate from that data to draw conclusions about lesbian households. The problem is that there are too many confounding variables. So then they fall back on their “vast untested social experiment” argument: we just don’t know how this is going to turn out. Which, again, is precisely the sort of thing we might expect the Montgomery parents to say to justify their “tradition.”

From the fact that two groups of people use the same forms of argument, it doesn’t follow that their conclusions are equally good or bad. It depends on the truth of their premises.

Still, the tendency of both segregationists and marriage-equality opponents to hide behind “that’s how I was raised” provides a powerful analogy—in moral laziness.

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John Corvino, Ph.D. is an author, speaker, and philosophy professor at Wayne State University in Detroit. His column “The Gay Moralist” appears weekly on 365gay.com. Read more about him at www.johncorvino.com.

John will be a volunteer faculty member this summer for Campus Pride’s Leadership Camp for GLBT students. For more about Campus Pride’s work, or to make a donation on John’s behalf to support this year’s program, visit http://www.campuspride.org/.

The former vice presidential candidate says in a statement, “The liberal onslaught of malicious attacks against Carrie Prejean for expressing her opinion is despicable.”

Prejean created a stir at last month’s Miss USA pageant when she said marriage should only be between a man and a woman.

Questions about her work with gay marriage opponents and nearly nude photos taken of her when she was a teenager had put her title in jeopardy, but pageant owner Donald Trump decided to let Prejean keep her state crown.

Palin says she respects Prejean for staying true to her beliefs and can relate to her “as a liberal target myself.”

Palin was a runner-up in the 1984 Miss Alaska contest.