The End of the Road for Carrie Prejean

Turns out that if you make at least eight sex tapes, then ask your boyfriend to lie about your age in them, then say that it's very Christian to get a boob job, and finally tell Larry King that he's being inappropriate for simply asking basic journalistic questions, you might find yourself on the defensive. And that's right where Carrie Prejean, the former Miss USA pageant contestant of "opposite marriage" fame, is finding herself these days.

Her latest setback? The National Organization for Marriage -- the conservative anti-gay organization that scooped Prejean up after her gay marriage comments at this year's Miss USA contest -- has disassociated themselves from the former beauty queen. After all, it's kind of hard to espouse traditional family values with a side order of lewd sex videos.

And the hits just keep on coming. According to Fred Karger of Californians Against Hate, Prejean has also had her invitation rescinded to speak at the GOP's Capitol Hill Club, a fancy pants conservative private club that caters to Republican lawmakers inside the Beltway. Even Meghan McCain got in on this story, saying that Prejean exudes hypocrisy.

"I find it even more disturbing that as long as you oppose gay marriage, filming yourself having sex is taken more lightly," McCain wrote for the Daily Beast. "Does anyone else see the hypocrisy in this kind of thinking? And hypocrisy is something the Republican Party can’t afford to have right now as the GOP struggles to find its identity."

Has Prejean finally worn her welcome out with the American public? One can only hope so. But on a broader level, it's sad that a sex tape, followed by another sex tape, followed by six more sex tapes and a disastrous CNN appearance had to cause folks to re-evaluate the efficacy of Carrie Prejean's message.

In reality, people do stupid shit all the time. Boys send pictures over their cell phones to their boyfriends or girlfriends. Girls send racy emails to their girlfriends or boyfriends. In a digital age, pictures will get released and words will be made public. For that, Prejean deserves some leeway, and maybe even some sympathy.

But to go before conservative summits like the Value Voters conference, or to appear before groups of Young Republicans and blab on-and-on about how gay families are inferior to straight families and that traditional values will save America is pretty shameful. And disingenuous.

For that, like it or not, Carrie Prejean joins a long list of folks -- as politically diverse as Larry Craig to John Edwards to Mark Sanford and Eliot Spitzer -- who say one set of things in public, but go pretty damn crazy in private.

Maggie Gallagher, the head of the National Organization for Marriage, tries to defend Prejean in a piece on townhall.com that says that Prejean isn't perfect, and she shouldn't be crucified for her indiscretions. She is, after all, a normal 22-year-old who always wanted to be a beauty queen more than she wanted to be the next Pat Robertson.

And maybe that's the lesson of this whole Prejean debacle of 2009. Before taking up the mantle as a family values crusader, and before basing your entire public image on trashing gay people for being less than, make sure your own house is in order.

Or, you know, just decide that everyone deserves the same basic rights and that life is too short to fight about whether someone should be allowed to love another person.

(Photo courtesy of fortschreitend's photostream on Photobucket.)