COMMENTARY: The beauty pageant and the beast

c. 1999 Religion News Service (Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of”My Brother Joseph,”published by St. Martin’s Press.) UNDATED _ The Miss America Pageant has become, like crimson leaves tumbling down, a sign of summer’s end, of […]

c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of”My Brother Joseph,”published by St. Martin’s Press.)

UNDATED _ The Miss America Pageant has become, like crimson leaves tumbling down, a sign of summer’s end, of lowering light and winter’s breathing heavily in the wings, waiting to pounce. In short, as with autumn itself, an event made more melancholy by the tinges of remembered beauty to be found in it.


If there is anything that has stayed too long on the stage of American life, next to any and every Clinton, Jerry Lewis, and Saturday Night Live, it is this dated rationalization for getting beautiful women into bathing suits in the name of poise and refinement.

But the Miss America contest has suddenly become Beauty among the Beasts of American Life. This year it attracted these beasts as the early Christians did the lions in the arena. If it did not slay them, it at least gave us a good look at them.

A dispute crackled like a leaf blaze over the revised conditions for entry that the national committee tried, in another move that revealed its archaic style, to impose from the top down on the state pageant committees. Henceforth, it was declared, no applicant could be barred if she had been divorced, pregnant, or had an abortion.

And here is where the coliseum doors were opened and the beasts of contemporary culture came ravenously forth.

The shaggiest and nastiest of them is, of course, the Law. Not the Law in itself as a magnificent human achievement but the Law as it is applied so universally and inappropriately all around us every day.

The national Miss America officials, in the impulse felt by all do-gooders, thought that they were re-writing the requirements for candidates to be in accord with the law that says that you cannot discriminate against people for reasons of gender, race, etc. To apply this logic meant, of course, it was no longer a Miss America Pageant at all.

Although it is hard to find the deeper level, where the beasts growl, in an event so shallow, it lies in the committee’s readiness to destroy the standard that defines the contest in order to seem politically correct.


It was, however, to the Law that the state committees turned in order to get an injunction to prevent the Pageant from, in effect, committing ritual suicide on national television by so readily overturning the requirement that defines it. Legal negotiations led to a tabling of the issue until next year. Meanwhile, home rules prevail.

The Beast here is the one that is devouring all of us. There is a strange judicial Midas at work in our lives, turning disputes that could and should be settled by old-fashioned conversation and common sense into lawsuits.

This resort to the Law not only overburdens it and overloads court dockets, but estranges us further from each other. Automatic recourse to the Law isolates us more from each other than either television or the Internet. It makes the Law less a mount to transport us in civil fashion through the thickets of life than the Beast that devours us, forcing us to employ strategies that erode our better spiritual possibilities.

The spiritual possibility consumed first by the Beast of the Law is our ability to trust one another. The Law is essentially adversarial. On principle, it pits its subjects against one another, using exaggerated and hostile accusations so routinely that everything is argued in a manner that drains off our faith in each other.

Without faith in each other we lose what makes us human. Diminish faith and you make hope and love difficult, if not impossible. America today is so restless because it has such trouble with intimacy.

The most sacred of our experiences, the ones that save us, take place in those close quarters in which the only thing that works is the truth. The same thing cannot be said about what happens in courtrooms every day.


That the nation’s spiritual plight has finally found a venue for debate in the Miss America Pageant tells us just how bad things really are. The Beauty, as in the myth, has attracted but hardly charmed the Beast. At least this second cousin to the county fair has revealed the woes that follow when any institution, even one as fragile as the Miss America contest, loses faith in its recipes for standards and invites the Law to lunch. Guess who gets eaten.

DEA END KENNEDY

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