When the federal court system was created, it wasn’t readily acknowledged that it had the potential to reshape American history. Nonetheless, after Marbury v. Madison, Brown v. Board of Education, and Flood v. Kuhn, it’s obvious that there are some cases that just seem destined to change the way the law works and Americans’ lives function. Certainly the case of Rebekah Revels will be remembered as one of those cases.

Much like those aforementioned cases, Revels’ case involves one of those most basic human rights that not even John Ashcroft and his legion of doom will seize from the citizenry – the right to be Miss North Carolina.

A difficulty in the case is that this right, cherished by many of the Founding Fathers (or Mothers, if you caught them on the weekends) of our nation, is counterbalanced with another right cherished by many men – the right to be a total jerk to your ex-girlfriends.

In case you’re not familiar with the case – and God willing, you aren’t and have spent your time feeding the poor, housing the homeless or hunting down infidels – Revels was crowned Miss North Carolina, but she was forced to abdicate her throne to Misty Dawn Clymer when Revels’ ex-boyfriend, Tosh Welch, informed the pageant of some topless photos of Revels, taken by, in a wonderful turn of events, himself.

Revels was told by pageant officials she would have to step down because of “the morals clause” in her contract, or else she would be fired. She resigned, sued Welch and then sued the Miss America organization in federal court. In the meantime, she has a court order naming her Miss North Carolina.

At this point, one thing, of course, is clear. With names like Tosh Welch, Rebekah Revels and Misty Dawn Clymer, you’d expect this trio to appear in movies with names like “Gone with the Wang” in a few years. Other than that, it seems the only sane thing to do is declare North Carolina to no longer be a state in the eyes of the Miss America pageant.

While most people would scoff at this legal dispute as the thing of coddled women in a disgusting meat market disguised as a contest, I think it’s a great step in the right direction. Alternatively, perhaps this sort of legal dispute could just become the first step in all state’s pageants. Rather than choose the pageant winner on faux-non-superficial grounds only to have every pageant winner nationwide look like professional models, every state should merely let the pageant contestants fight their way through the court system.

The last pageant contestants and their attorneys will then take their case to the Supreme Court to determine once and for all who the real Miss America is. After all, if it’s good enough to decide who the president is, it should certainly be good enough for Miss America. Plus, it’d be worth millions to see the look on Justice Scalia’s face when he has to ask Miss Montana what her favorite food is.

For now, my best estimate is that this case is merely a conspiracy to clog the federal courts system with claims about the Miss America pageant so that those self-righteous crusaders at the ACLU who believe in “trials” and “free speech” won’t have any slots on the docket to protest the Patriot Act and other extraordinarily unconstitutional pieces of legislation.

Perhaps most earth-shattering is that this case comes so close in time to Sept. 11, reminding us that mind-numbing crap like this and Elian Gonzalez used to dominate our airwaves.

Now it’s “war on terror” this and “kill that tyrant Saddam” that, leaving next to no room for pithy disputes over beauty pageants. However, it’s good to see that this monologue fodder can once again clog our nation’s airwaves, making each of us dumber by the second.

There’s also a loss of innocence that’s occurring, however. Before this case, when I’d heard of pageant contestants sleeping with the judges, I never assumed they meant those at the Court of Appeals.

Tim Kearns

is a senior in political science from Bellevue, Neb.