The Miss Virginia Pageant is leaving Roanoke to take up residence at Liberty University in Lynchburg, starting next year.

To make sure we have this straight, the Christian school that expels single students who enjoy healthy sexual relationships with others or female students who wear attire they consider inappropriate or revealing will start hosting a beauty pageant with contestants who strut around the stage in bikinis?

The answer is “no.”  The swimsuit competition is now dropped from both the Miss Virginia Pageant and Miss America.

While we enjoy looking at sweet young things in bikinis (and less or perhaps no attire on other enjoyable occasions), we find it hypocritical that a school that exploits keeping young men and women chaste could have promoted a beauty pageant that features attractive women barely over the age of consent cavorting around university’s stage in skimpy attire that shows more skin than their underwear probably covers.

While swimsuits and bikinis are no more the gowns of these pageants still feature ample cleavages.

Liberty throws out unmarried female students who get pregnant. The school gets upset if students display what they consider “too much skin.” God help any coed who might show up in one of Playboy magazine’s “Girls of…” pictorials.

Liberty enforces morality with “The Liberty Way,” the school “honor code.”  It discourages watching movies rated “R” or even “PG-13” and tells women to dress in ways that express “modesty, appropriateness and neatness.”

In other words, no tight jean shorts, micro mini skirts, halter tops or bare midriff blouses.  In Liberty’s typically sexist way, it discusses how women should dress but not men.

Liberty students caught drinking off campus are subject to dismissal.

Now comes the Miss Virginia pageant, which selects the Old Dominion’s representative to the Miss America gathering each year.  The pageant, which used to require one-piece swimsuits with “modesty panels” allowed contestants to strut their stuff in bikinis and evening gowns can, and often do, show cleavage, lots of leg and other revealing parts of a contestant’s anatomy.

I don’t dislike beauty pageants or a chance to admire the female form. I served as a judge in a Miss Smyth County pageant during the 1960s, dated a Miss Floyd County and a couple of Miss Virginia’s in the same time period. As a male with a healthy libido, I enjoyed that time of my life and I still enjoy the beauty of attractive women.  I’ve photographed women in the nude over the years and see nothing wrong with nudity as long as the person stripping down is at least 18.  As an avid movie goer, I would rather watch a film with nudity rather than one with gratuitous violence.

But the hypocrisy of Liberty University is on display by seeking the Miss Virginia pageant.  It’s not the only time we have seen the school look the other way when it comes to exploiting morality and embracing the sordid sides of life.  School president Dr. Jerry Falwell Jr. embraces President Donald Trump, who is hardly what one would call a moral man or a good Christian.

Which makes us wonder about the darker sides of the “moral” folks who run the largest Christian university in the world.

Could make one hell of a story.