Here She Comes, Ms. America.

Should the pageant allow women to compete who are divorced or who have had an abortion?

YES Whether the issue is swimsuits or the personal histories of its contestants, the pageant is dependably behind the times and slow to change.

In its latest rules flap, the pageant's national board said they would drop their policy of requiring contestants to state that they had never been married or pregnant. They thought, rightly, that anyone who was a "miss" at contest time ought to be able to compete. But local pageant directors rebelled. They are fighting to preserve a decades-long tradition in which contestants and contest winners have been exposed to endless scrutiny of their private lives to determine whether they are "pure" enough to enter or win the contest. This is nothing less than invasion of privacy.

It is doubtful that the 300,000 citizens who work in state and local pageants really think that every contestant has practiced abstinence. What drives this attitude among the local pageants is: not analysis of the real world, but nostalgia for a fictional American past. In reality, that small-town past was never as virtuous as it appeared, but its unblemished myth is still a powerful force in American life.

The backwardness of the Miss America Pageant could even be taken as endearing, if its longing for an imaginary America did not so regularly take the form of hurtful and discriminatory rules.

--EDITORIAL The New York Times

NO The Miss America contest has suddenly become Beauty among the Beasts of American life. This year, the pageant attracted these beasts as the early Christians did the lions in the arena.

The beasts lie in the pageant's readiness to destroy the standard that defines the contest in order to seem politically correct. Henceforth, it was declared, no applicant could be barred if she had been divorced, pregnant, or had an abortion.

The national Miss America officials, in the impulse felt by all dogooders, thought that they were rewriting 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.

There is a strange judicial Midas at work in our lives, turning disputes that should be settled by old-fashioned common sense into lawsuits. This resort to the law not only overburdens it and overloads court dockets, but estranges us further from each other.

Without faith in each other we lose what makes us human. At least the Miss America Pageant has revealed the woes that follow when any institution loses faith in its recipes for standards and invites the law to lunch. Guess who gets eaten.

EUGENE KENNEDY
Professor Emeritus of
Psychology
Loyola University,
Chicago