David McElroy

If it weren’t for hateful bigots, I wouldn’t have any idea who the new Miss America is.

It’s hard for me to care one way or the other about who wins beauty pageants. (Excuse me. “Scholarship pageants.”) But the level of ignorance and bigotry involved in some people complaining because a woman of Indian ancestry won is disturbing.

After Nina Davuluri was crowned Miss America Sunday night, racist bigots took to Twitter to denounce an “Arab” — yes, seriously — winning the title. The sorts of people who would attack her for having Indian ancestry are the sorts who wouldn’t understand that India isn’t home to Arabs.

After Vanessa Williams was crowned the first black Miss America in 1983, some people grumbled, but they didn’t have the Internet to spread their bigotry for the whole world to see. I didn’t care one way or the other at the time, but some people did. They just didn’t like the idea of a black woman being held up as our ideal woman. (Don’t we all have a different idea of who the ideal woman is?)

The pageant isn’t “Miss White Girl Who Looks Like Me,” so it’s natural that people from different backgrounds are going to win. I assume that Davuluri was the best contestant this year. I don’t have a clue, but I also don’t have an opinion about who should have won last year or the year before that or pretty much any other year.

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Over the weekend, a woman in California killed her two children in a motel room and then wrecked her car in an attempt to kill herself. She then tried to choke herself, but she was rescued. On the way to a hospital, she told police where to find her dead children. We don’t know much about her other than that she lives in Arizona and was driving a car with Georgia license plates.

Stories such as this are gut-wrenching for most of us, because it’s one of our most basic instincts to protect children and save them from harm. We tend to assume this is just a snap decision by someone who’s mentally ill. But other stories are even more horrific — and long term.

When Jonathan Adleta’s girlfriend, Sarah, got pregnant, he wouldn’t agree to marry her until she agreed that he could engage in “daddy-daughter sex” with the girl after she was born. They married and Adleta abused the child. His wife was expected to engaged in sex with a son when they had one in the future. The pair are on trial now after their crimes were discovered. (That’s their mugshots above.)

Parents fail in horrific ways all the time, some of which are criminal acts, but most of which are legal, but still damaging to children. For those of us who reject the legitimacy of the state, this brings up an uncomfortable and difficult question. If we reject the state, who is to protect children? Who is to step in when monsters such as the Adletas hurt their children? And who is to make decisions when parents are making crazy decisions that damage their kids?

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It’s interesting to hear what conservatives say when they’re talking just among themselves. Same with progressives, libertarians and other groups. Despite the groups’ very different beliefs, there’s a common thread that I tend to observe.

In all of these groups, they might argue among themselves at times, but you can tell they generally come from the same set of assumptions about the world. I tend to listen to a lot of these sorts of discussions. I rarely participate, because I’m getting to the point that it’s not worth arguing. So I just listen and try to figure out what groups believe and how the social groups interact. It’s sort of like being a political sociologist without getting paid for it.

When I listen to the supporters of pretty much any political viewpoint, I can understand the logic of what they believe — if I simply accept their assumptions about the world. No matter how much I disagree with them, I can almost always understand where they’re coming from.

But the vast majority of these people are disdainful of those in other groups. They clearly don’t have any understanding of what the other groups believe or why. What’s more, they’re not really interested in what the other groups believe or why. They’re mostly interested in making fun of them or putting them down in various ways, many times viciously. Within the groups, there seems to be an air of superiority that is amazingly similar. If you removed the ideological content of what they were saying and just looked at the social content of what they were expressing, you’d be hard pressed to figure out which groups were which.

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