Child beauty pageants, love them, hate them, ignore them or are they just a money making gimmick?

Taking a objective look at
http://hubpages.com/hub/Child-Beauty-Pageants,
are child beauty pageants a great way to instill discipline, self-consciousness, a form of abuse, a money making gimmick, self-esteem killer? With child pageants you either love them or you hate them (with the “I hate them” crowd slightly more vocal). I seen an excerpt on one anti-pageant site that said:

I am always amazed by parents who press their children into beauty pageants because there is an embedded perversion in wanting to help create an idealized image of a mature woman in the body of a five or six-year-old child.

Would you agree that any parent who would place their child in a pageant as being mentally warped?

Another eluded to: Can anyone be surprised that child beauty pageants pander to and attract perverts and pedophiles? Isn’t that the audience those pageants are purposefully serving? Aren’t child beauty pageants that sexualize children really meat markets for pedophiles seeking the purchase of a sexual treat?

Mature men and women do not take an interest in the overt sexualization of children idealized as adults. Would you go as far as to say anyone who places their child in pageants are sexual deviants or just serving their children up to pedophiles like a ham on a platter?

Is it all just one big brouhaha concocted by the media because of a small but vocal pageant opposition?