Miss California defends her comments on ‘Today’

Miss California Carrie Prejean competes during the 2009 Miss USA Pageant Sunday April 19, 2009 at The Planet Hollywood Resort & Casino in Las Vegas. Miss North Carolina Kristen Dalton was later crowned Miss USA. (AP Photo/Eric Jamison)

After Carrie Prejean was named first runner-up to Miss North Carolina, Kristen Dalton, on Sunday night’s Miss USA Pageant, Perez Hilton recorded a video on You Tube in which he said Carrie gave “the worst answer in pageant history and that she lost because she is a dumb B****!”

On Tuesday morning’s Today Show on NBC, Miss USA judge, Claudia Jordan, admitted that “a few of the judges were very against her, they were bothered by her answer.

“I think it’s great that Americans are able to choose one or the other,” Prejean responded in her answer. “But in my country, and in my family, I think that I believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman. No offense to anybody out there, but that’s how I was raised.”

While many involved in the Miss USA Pageant believe the San Diego native lost the crown because of her answer, the organizers of the Greater Miss San Diego Pageant say the judges are in the wrong to continue their rants against Prejean.

“She spoke honestly, that’s all you can ask for,” says Debra Dodge, assistant director of the Greater Miss San Diego Pageant. Dodge and Pam Wilson say in their Pageant they stress that judges are supposed to judge the contestants on conviction. “We don’t want the women to answer the question and try to please the judge, we want them to be their own person,” says Wilson.

Dodge and Wilson require their judges to understand the importance of setting their own feelings aside. “I just don’t think that you bash someone because you disagree with their opinions, we’re supposed to be celebrating differences,” says Wilson.

The Miss Greater San Diego organizers say they can’t speak on behalf of the way Miss USA is organized, but they say when it comes to their pageant, “you will never see a judge like Perez Hilton on our panel.”

Hilton, who also appeared on the “Today” show Tuesday, said his question was relevant and that Prejean should have “left her politics and her religion out because Miss USA represents all Americans.”

Prejean, who was named first runner-up at the pageant, told Lauer that she knew “at that moment after I’d answered the question, I knew that I was not going to win because of my answer.” Still, she stands by her statements.

“I don’t take back what I said,” she told Lauer, adding that she “had spoken from my heart, from my beliefs and for my God.”

“It’s not about being politically correct,” she said. “For me, it’s about being biblically correct.”

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