During the Miss America pageant gossip blogger and judge(why?) Perez Hilton asked Miss California for her take on gay marriage, she had a simple answer, “sorry if it offends you but for me and my family it is between a man and a woman.” She was asked for her opinion and she gave it, nuff said, at least it should have been but then Perez felt the need to go online and rail against the woman using terribly demeaning language. He then apologized before renouncing his own apology today and escalating his vulgarity and sexist slurs.

Now I don’t know if Miss California, who is as close to physical perfection a woman can achieve, lost because of her answer but I can say with certainty there is something very wrong with the reaction to her position. In the land of the free a woman is entitled to her opinion and in a beauty contest that opinion shouldn’t matter as much as the way she looks, the way she walks or her ability to convey meaning with her words. I don’t know why anyone cares what her thoughts on gay marriage are but if you are going to ask the question you should be prepared for the answer and not go on an insane tirade hurling invectives, insults and sexist language at a woman because her opinion differs from yours. Man up and deal with a world that doesn’t always agree with you.

I would ask this of Perez and anyone else offended, would you rather the woman lied? Would you rather she look you in the eye, pander to you and tell you what you want to hear but not what she believes? Looking at the recent vote in California that banned gay marriage I can see how the world will work if we all hide what we believe rather than be honest about what we want. In California Democrats walked away with huge majorities in 2008 but when it came time to take a stand Prop 8 passed. Couldn’t you argue that at least some of those voters who seemed like they were going to vote one way actually voted another? Was it just radical right wing conservatives and “dumb __tch’s” in Perez’s words skewing the vote against the vast Democratic majority in California or were people telling pollsters, gay activists and their friends what they wanted to hear?

We are rapidly living in a country that does not celebrate diversity but punishes people for having a differing opinion. Diversity is not an episode of the Real World or a television commercial where gay, lesbian, black, white, Hispanic and ethnic stereotypes live in a loft and learn to love one another. Diversity is an all encompassing and disharmonious collection of things many of which stand in total opposition to one another. The “celebration of” or “respect for” diversity the left talks so much about is, in reality, the complete opposite of what many practice. Diversity instead becomesTHEIR opinions at the expense of everyone elses because to be against something they believe must be hateful and mean spirited. Diversity means celebrating the rights of chosen minorities, blacks, gays and ultra feminist women and when anyone challenges them they are maligned as racists, sexists or homophobes.

But diversity is about respecting the rights of others to hold a differing opinion and respecting it means much more than you can convey in a slogan on a T-shirt or on a bumper sticker. It means accepting that in certain places your opinion is not the majority and acknowledging that what makes us different doesn’t make us less intelligent or less of a person.

Miss California was right to tell the truth, to stand by her beliefs and to not simply pander to what she thought the host would want to hear. Her honesty is as beautiful as the body she was given and the vicious and demeaning response from Hilton as ugly as the body he inhabits.