Miss USA 2013: Top 6 Questions & Answers (+video)

6. Miss Texas

(AP Photo/Miss Universe Organization, Darren Decker)
Miss Texas USA 2013, Ali Nugent, competes in her swimsuit during the preliminary show in Las Vegas in June 2013.

Judge Betsey Johnson, an American fashion designer, asks: “In a recent beauty pageant bikinis were banned amid protests from religious groups. As someone who competed in a swimsuit tonight, do you believe such groups should have that influence? Why or why not?”

(The question refers to the Miss World pageant in Indonesia, where bikinis were banned from the contest, after the organizers were pressured by Muslim groups)

Miss Texas, Ali Nugent answers: “I think we live in a country where we have freedoms that people around the world don’t. And we have the ability to vote for things we agree with and vote against things we don’t agree with. I personally am very confident with myself, and I feel perfectly fine being up here in front of millions of people in a swimsuit, but I absolutely agree with those people: They have the right to stand up and vote against whatever they feel is not necessary.”

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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