Muzzling Miss America: Beauty Queen Defies Ban on Promoting Purity

ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. — Erika Harold may be wearing the crown, but it's not certain that she has the microphone — at least not when she wants to promote sexual abstinence.

Crowned Miss America 2003 on Sept. 21, Harold said Oct. 8 pageant officials had ordered her not to talk publicly about abstinence, the cause she championed as a beauty pageant contestant in Illinois.

Harold, from Urbana, Ill., told The Washington Times that “there are pressures from some sides to not promote abstinence.”

On Oct. 9 she told reporters at a press conference in suburban Chicago that her complaints had succeeded in removing the muzzle imposed by pageant officials.

Harold said Miss America Chief Executive George Bauer had rescinded the prohibition on speaking about abstinence, The Washington Times reported.

“I don't think the pageant organizers really understood how much I am identified with the abstinence message,” Harold said at a ceremony crowning her successor as Miss Illinois.

“If I don't speak about it now as Miss America,” she said, “I will be disappointing the thousands of young people throughout Illinois who need assurance that waiting until marriage for sex is the right thing to do.”

However, The Washington Times reported that as of Oct. 9, Bauer had still declined to make a public statement regarding the pageant's position. But Harold said at her press conference that he would issue a statement affirming her freedom to promote abstinence “in the next few days.”

Harold has advocated premarital chastity throughout Illinois on behalf of Project Reality, a Chicago-based nonprofit that has been a pioneer in the field of abstinence education. By the time she was crowned Miss Illinois in June, Harold had presented that message to more than 14,000 young people.

Since 1990, Miss America and affiliated state pageants have required contestants to adopt an official “platform” issue. Harold won the Miss Illinois contest with her platform of “Teen-age Sexual Abstinence: Respect Yourself, Protect Yourself.”

“The Miss Illinois state board asked all candidates to sign a pledge that if they won they would adopt the state issue of violence prevention,” said Kathleen Sullivan, director of Project Reality. “Erika agreed to sign that pledge because sexual involvement is one of the chief causes of teen violence. She could make abstinence part of the overall message. Now she is being pressured to talk only about violence prevention.”

Happened Before

It's a tactic other pageant winners have said is common.

“The pageant people see [abstinence promotion] as a political issue rather than a moral one,” said Mary-Louise Kurey, 1999 Miss Wisconsin. “When I competed and won Miss Wisconsin with the abstinence platform, the Miss America pageant contacted the Miss Wisconsin state board and encouraged them to have me change my platform.”

“The board approached me and told me that I could change my platform to character education and have abstinence be a part of it, but they left the decision up to me,” Kurey recalled. “I said, ‘No way.’ This message is too important to water down.”

According to Kurey, some states ask candidates to adopt a state platform, “but with Miss America, her platform is whatever she has won the state competition with. Just because you win the crown does not mean that you lose your right to freedom of speech.”

“Erika won saying that she would speak about this issue,” Kurey continued. “They are wrong to try to take that away from her. She has encouraged teens to be abstinent for years. Her heart is in this issue.”

Harold and Kurey are not alone. Project Reality has identified more than 30 Miss America candidates who chose abstinence before marriage as their platform. In fact, a group including both Harold and Kurey testified before Congress on increased funding for abstinence education last April.

The morning after winning the title, Harold told Diane Sawyer on “Good Morning America” that she was not asked to change her platform.

“When you win the state title, you find some way to incorporate a message that is really important to you into the violence prevention platform,” Harold told Sawyer. “So it's not that you change what you're talking about, but you expand your message and broaden it so that you really touch a lot of lives during the year.”

Asked whether she would continue to talk about abstinence, she responded, “That will be something I talk about, but I'm going to talk about it in the context of youth violence prevention and how promiscuity and teen pregnancy can be a risk factor in terms of violence and destructive behaviors.”

Still, others wonder if Harold wasn't being bullied.

“The Illinois pageant people are putting a lot of pressure on Erika. They're going with the platform that is most politically correct,” said Libby Gray, public relations director with Project Reality.

“We are hoping that the Miss America people will see that it is to their advantage to let Erika talk about this issue, which is so important to her and will reach hundreds of thousands of students,” she added.

‘Changed My Life’

Gray mentioned an e-mail a young girl from an inner-city Chicago school sent to Harold after she won the crown. The e-mail asked her to continue her abstinence message.

“You changed my life because of what you said, and now I made the decision to be abstinent because of what you said,” the e-mail stated. “I really hope that as Miss America you continue to share that because it changed my life and I think it can change lots of others.”

“It's a great witness to what her message could do,” Gray said.

“I would hate to think that there are kids all over the country who now wonder, you know, ‘Did I make the right decision in making that commitment, if this person who inspired me to do it no longer is willing to share that commitment on the national stage?’” Harold said. “I would feel like a hypocrite if I did not.”

Tim Drake writes from St. Cloud, Minnesota.