Apparently Kathryn Jean Lopez, editor of National Review Online, has published a piece that credits beauty queen and former Miss California Carrie Prejean for "saving traditional marriage" and holding back the push for marriage equality.
I kid you not. Of course how Lopez accomplishes this is an old trick that I have seen the religious right do - take several unrelated incidents and link them together. The credibility of these claims generally depend on the emotions of the audience they are writing to.
Lopez is obviously a master of this because according to her after Prejean made her now infamous statement and had her brush up with gossip columnist Perez Hilton, the momentum started to shift against marriage equality.
Of course she claims that it is not her argument but that of National Organization for Marriage head Maggie Gallagher's in the newest issue of the National Review, which has Prejean on the cover. But if you ask me, based on what she wrote, it's obvious that Lopez had an whiff of whatever Gallagher was inhaling when she wrote her piece:
The New York Times, just a day or so after Gallagher's piece ran, confirmed that something has changed. In an article titled "Backers of Gay Marriage Rethink California Push," the paper reported on how, discouraged by the political and cultural climate, many gay-marriage advocates are scaling back efforts to overturn Proposition 8. This, despite the supposed inevitability of which some of my friends on the right were all but convinced, not long ago.
In reality, there is much debate amongst those who want to overturn Proposition 8 on whether it would be advantageous to pursue this action in 2010 or 2012. I hardly think it has anything to do with Prejean seeing that the situation with Proposition 8had been taking place long before she verbalized her opinion about gay marriage.
The last part of Lopez's piece is a hoot:
And unlike the most strident advocates of gay marriage, who spent the time during and after the Proposition 8 campaign intimidating and punishing those who supported the measure, most of us who oppose gay marriage are not looking to exclude anyone from any kind of happiness.
Carrie Prejean is now a face of that kind of tolerance. The contrast of her measured, mildly offered opinion to the angry, ugly Internet response from beauty-contestant judge Perez Hilton, who asked Prejean the fateful question, was striking . . . According to a recent CBS/New York Times poll, support for gay marriage has dropped nine percentage points from a 42 percent historic high. According to Gallup, only 13 percent of Americans believe that gay marriage would make us better off, while 48 percent believe it would be change for the worse. While Republicans were tripping over themselves to pose with the party's Log Cabin branch and join the march of inevitability, a beauty queen made it OK to confidently acknowledge reality, in a loving and beautiful and even tolerant way.
So Lopez, Gallagher, and others are trying to make Prejean some sort of symbol now; a Florence Nightingale-cum-Betsy Ross of the anti-gay marriage movement.
It could work.
All they have to do is make everyone forget about those half naked pictures of her, her breast implants, and her wannabe-divalike behavior that led Donald Trump (who was in her corner)to finally kick her to the curb.
And I haven't even scratched how Gallagher and her National Organization for Marriage tried to distance themselves from Prejean when it was discovered that there were some tire tracks in that pure as the driven snow image she has tried to project.
The entire thing leaves me depressed. Obviously, Lopez can't seriously believe that tripe she wrote. But she is getting paid a lot of money for it.
How can I get in on that racket?
