What Beauty Pageants Can Learn From Toastmasters

With all the brouhaha about Carrie Prejean, Miss California USA, which started once she answered a judge's question about gay marriage, one point has been conspicuously overlooked: Why should she have been the only contestant to have received that question? That was patently unfair, as that question (coming from a gay judge) was loaded from the start. Nobody really knows how the other contestants would have answered it. Admittedly, I did not see the pageant (an anachronism, in my view), but it seems to be that under these circumstances, the other beauty queens may have received puffballs that offered no threat of controversy.
The fairest thing would have been to give all them the same question. Toastmasters International does this with its Table Topics contest (a contest in extemporaneous speaking). All contestants wait outside the contest area, and each is escorted back to the room singly, in succession, to receive the same question. The contestants are then judged on their abilities to assemble their thoughts and present their answers in an organized manner.
This would have been a much fairer way to judge the Miss USA contestants' poise and mental agility that to subject them all to different standards.

Postscript: As I write this, Donald Trump has just announced at a press conference that Ms. Prejean will continue as Miss California. It has been a great example of spin and self service. Trump trumpeted how "important" the pageant has become since he bought it. Then Prejean spoke of her right to speak, adding inexplicably and perfunctorily how her grandfather fought with General Patton. She also launched into a diatribe on freedom of speech, which no one except the contest judge disputed. No one at the press conference addressed the point of how Prejean has subsequently gone on to a public platform against gay marriage, which has nothing to do with her role as Miss California.