Let's be honest: beauty pageants are about how hot the contestants are. I won't pass judgment on whether this is morally acceptable or reprehensible, but since I once dated a beauty pageant contestant, I may be a bit biased anyway :)What I do have a problem with is the farce, perpetrated by the organizers, that everyone watching is going to be concerned with these girls' intellectual sophistication.
If you want to choose someone based on how hot she is, just be honest and admit it, because when you don't, and you ask these girls a simple question, such as whether evolution should be taught in school (the only theory that can explain and connect all of biology into one coherent conceptual and testable framework supported by massive amounts of evidence, and what the hell kind of question is that anyway? why not ask whether the 'theory' of gravity should be taught too?), these are the dumbass sorts of answers you're going to get:
Did you get that? Even the girls who are pro-evolution can't always come up with decent support for their position.
I could teach a semester worth of logical fallacies based on these 15 minutes...
And yes, most of these girls may be misinformed, naive and/or dumb, and you may cringe at their stupid answers as I did, but I wonder who's at fault:
- Impressionable girls who probably grew up being brainwashed with the fantasy of beauty pageants instead of the value of an educated and independent mind, or
- The event organizers, who are aware of these girls' backgrounds and still threw them a fastball purely for the sake of creating controversy to increase their own ratings.
Finally, Miss California, give me a call sometime :)