As if the pathetic Miss California USA, Carrie Prejean (about whom I’ve blogged a couple times already), weren’t already a caricature of everything that’s wrong with fundamentalist Christianity in the US, she goes and heaps yet another cliché on the pile of crap she’s accumulated. According to US News & World Report, she blames the sorry affair on Satan:
Three weeks after becoming a hero to conservative Christians with her answer to a gay marriage question at the Miss USA pageant, Carrie Prejean hits the big kahuna of Christian radio this week, appearing today and tomorrow on James Dobson’s daily Focus on the Family program.
In the most intriguing part of today’s interview, Prejean describes the battle between God and Satan as she was formulating her response to Miss USA judge Perez Hilton’s thorny question. …
I felt as though Satan was trying to tempt me in asking me [Perez Hilton’s] question. …
I’ll grant that “Perez Hilton” (I refuse to believe that’s his real name!) was trying to goad conservatives — if not her personally — with that pageant question. And to be honest, the guy is no saint; quite the contrary, he’s a muckraking, self-promoting celebrity-blogger. Even so, the Miss USA pageant knew this when they invited him to be there, and Ms Prejean and all the other contestants had to have known he’d pull an obnoxious stunt or two. For her not to have been prepared with a glib yet diplomatic answer that didn’t give Hilton what he wanted (i.e. a confrontation), is inexplicable.
But neither does the question — no matter how incendiary it was intended to be — grant her the right to have violated her pageant contract and get away with it, then become lauded as a Christian martyr and heroine by fundamentalists.
At any rate, the tactic of blaming one’s problems on Satan and his campaign to tempt all Christians, is almost as old as Christianity itself. It would be nice if Christians could try to be a little more original in their excuse-making, than to invoke the name of Satan.