Here She Comes, Ms. America.

• Author: KENNEDY, EUGENE
• Position: Opposing views on Miss America contest standards - Brief Article

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...