Nov 21, 2002 3 min read

The folks running the Miss America Pageant want to strap a muzzle on their reigning beauty queen. They ought to order up a few for themselves. Every time they open their mouths to criticize Erika Harold’s virtuous and commendable message of abstinence, the Miss America officials sound like raging hypocrites.

Their pageant, after all, with all of its prim rules and proper imagery – including until recently one-piece bathing suits, for heaven’s sake! – is all about wholesomeness.

And that’s precisely the message the new Miss America wants to preach.

Harold, 22, used her visibility as Miss Illinois to encourage teens to abstain from sex. It is an important and necessary message, given the sleazy influences kids are bombarded with daily and the lifelong impact pregnancy can have.

Pageant officials ought to be encouraging Harold to keep up the good work, not pressuring her to get off the abstinence soapbox.

Instead, they want Harold to focus on this year’s pageant theme: youth violence. We don’t have a problem with that. Who could? Our society is plagued by violence, none more heartbreaking than the tragic violence kids inflict on one another.

And Harold herself has not declined to carry out her contractual obligation to give the organizational theme due attention. She simply wants to do more, by also addressing an issue for which she feels even greater passion.

It defies logic, raises question about pageant officials’ judgment and is an affront to sensible-thinking people everywhere that this American “ideal” would be told to knock off the idealism.

Coming to Harold’s defense, a spokeswoman for Concerned Women for America rightly charged that the Miss America Organization’s stand “betrays a hidden agenda of political correctness and religious bigotry among pageant officials.”

The officials, she continued, “are attacking Erika Harold’s values, which goes completely against what everyone thought the Miss America pageant stood for.”

There’s no mistaking pageant officials’ bias. Another contestant, 1999’s Miss Wisconsin, also says she was discouraged from talking about teen abstinence.

Fortunately, Harold prevailed in her cause, although it took two days of discussions.

“The hallmark of the Miss America Organization,” she said following those talks, “is its empowerment of young women to speak their mind on a variety of issues.”

We’re glad to see pageant officials figured that out, or were too embarrassed to keep up the fight. Either way, impressionable kids are better off for Miss America’s defense of America’s right to free speech.

It is all the more satisfying that, compared with much of the speech we hear today, it is right-minded and responsible speech.