Perez Hilton, that gossip blogger extraordinaire, was one of the judges at Saturday’s Miss USA pageant, so you know that during the Q and A portion of the show, he had to ask a question about gay marriage.

Miss California took the stage. We were all prepared for a relatively safe, liberal answer about love and affection and who cares who you love and whatnot.

But instead, Miss California talked about how marriage should be between one man and one woman, thus effectively costing her the crown.

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Perez has been abuzz about it all weekend. Miss California talked to Access Hollywood about it, and said that though her family believes in gay marriage, ‘it’s not a matter of being gay or not gay, it’s a matter of you competing for Miss USA and getting a question and answering it to the best of your ability.’

What? So answering a question to the best of your ability means blatantly putting down an entire minority? Is this really what Miss USA has come to?

Certainly the pageant is not something that’s to be taken too seriously. Remember in 2007 when Miss Teen USA South Carolina delivered that hilarious response to a question about why Americans can’t locate anything on a map? For that matter, why the heck are they asking Miss USA contestants questions about maps? Does that have anything to do with bathing suits and formal wear?

There’s nothing inherently wrong with the Miss USA pageant. Sure, it’s a bit of a sexist male institution, merely there to parade beautiful women around in various states of undress. But in terms of the harm it does to women, it seems to be around the level of the Victoria’s Secret fashion show and leg warmers – nothing to get terribly worked up about, but nothing that was going to give the feminists anything but ammo.

But if the Miss USA pageant is going to shift toward more serious topics and more serious issues, as it appears to have been doing in the last couple years, then the distributors of the show should not pretend like it’s nothing more than a fashion show.

These women can be smart, and some of them probably are quite smart. But put a scared 18-year-old girl on a stage with 20,000 people watching live and an additional few million watching via their television sets and the odds of something dumb coming out of their mouths increases twofold.

The people who run and profit from Miss USA need to determine whether they want this to be a serious night of intellectual debate or just a series of women in bathing suits. The questions they are asking appear to be in conflict with what the competition is really about, which is showcasing great looking women with talents.

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I’d love it if we could go back to the simpler times when the most embarrassing thing a Miss USA contestant could do was play the theme music to ‘Star Wars’ really poorly on a trumpet.