But according to Carol Radtke, president of the board for the Miss Illinois scholarship program, all local contestants understand that youth violence prevention is the state's official platform in the Miss America competition. They can weave into their own personal cause, she said, should they win the state pageant. "Erika was encouraged, for the youth of the United States and internationally," said Radtke, "to work with the big picture of youth against violence, and to draw upon her own personal experience of bullying and harassment."

Harold responded to the "encouragement" by sticking to the subject of youth violence during the national pageant and immediately after, when she flew to Brussels for the launch of the World Health Organization's Report on Violence and Health, and garnered the support of several other social and political advocacy groups, including the Anti-Defamation League and the National Center for Victims of Crime. She repeated a litany of heartbreaking stories about the racial and sexual harassment she suffered in the ninth grade, a brutal time in which she said she was called a whore and a slut, and discovered that kids were pooling lunch money to buy a rifle to kill her.

Incredibly, Harold had never publicly spoken of this torment before taking on the youth violence platform as Miss Illinois. Libby Gray, one of Harold's mentors at Chicago-based Project Reality, an abstinence-only group that trains beauty contestants to advocate premarital chastity, says of Harold's torment: "I've known her for four years and I didn't know about it."

Harold, Gray said, has since explained that she wasn't "emotionally ready to talk about her bullying history" prior to winning Miss Illinois. And also, Gray said, "the state people gave Erika the impression that it wouldn't be savvy to mention abstinence (at the national pageant)."

Even more likely is the possibility that Harold believed staying mum on chastity would help her win. "We had conversations too," Gray said, "and she felt it wouldn't be prudent for her to talk about it."

That prudence, Gray suggested, was grounded not just in the coaching of state handlers, but in the conventional wisdom of abstinence activists. Gray produced as evidence an article posted online two years ago by conservative World Magazine accusing "liberal cultural forces" of pressuring beauty queen contestants to "abstain from having abstinence platforms."

The story quotes one such contestant, Brooke Buie, who allegedly couldn't advance with her platform "Sexual Abstinence and Self-Worth." So she took the "sheep in wolf's clothing" approach to win Miss Texas runner-up with the broader platform of "Aids Awareness."

"You just have to decide what your goal is," Buie told World. "Do you want to stick to sexual abstinence no matter what? Or do you want to get as high up as you can so that you can have a national platform to say what you want once you have the title?"

As Miss America, Harold has repeated her stories about racial and sexual harassment, recently adding that a school principal responded to her request for help during the bullying by saying, "If you'd only be more submissive like the other girls, this wouldn't happen to you."

Harold and her father have said that she will continue to talk in generalities about the harassment, but will not name names. Gray, meanwhile, explains that for Harold, abstinence was such a positive thing, "a great choice that empowered her as a young woman," that she naturally chose abstinence over violence as her pageant cause.

Certainly Gray, and others on the frontlines of America's abstinence-only movement, have not been surprised by Harold's passion for the chastity cause, which she has promoted throughout her pageant career as a contestant and as a spokeswoman for Project Reality. Funded primarily by the Illinois Department of Human Services, Project Reality adheres to such teaching principles as "sex outside of marriage can cause physical or psychological harm." Contraceptives cannot be mentioned except to discuss failure rates.

In her written testimony for Welfare Reform's reauthorization of more abstinence funding, Harold wrote of being accepted and receiving awards for speaking out about sexual abstinence. "This was recognition that not only is the abstinence movement an important new sexual revolution," she said, "but it is also a movement that my generation must lead."

In a 1999 Eagle Forum Education Reporter article, Project Reality director Kathleen Sullivan called Harold and another beauty queen "the wave of the future" and "role models ... emerging at the start of the new millennium who may spark a new type of sexual revolution." Continued Sullivan, "The fact that these lovely, confident young women not only know the importance of reserving the marital act until marriage, but were willing to make abstinence their platform in the Miss Illinois Pageant, is very refreshing."

A letter of recommendation from Project Reality for Miss America's Community Service Award further documents Harold's longtime involvement in the pro-abstinence movement.

"For the past three years, Erika has served as a field representative for Project Reality, a national organization promoting adolescent health through abstinence education," wrote director Sullivan. The letter outlines Harold's achievements with Project Reality, including speaking to more than 14,000 young people, meeting with more than 100 legislative offices, and submitting written testimony to pass the House bill for more abstinence funding through Welfare Reform reauthorization.

However, the letter speaks of general abstinence from "risky behaviors" and mentions sex only once. "Although Erika's platform has been centered on the message of sexual abstinence," says the letter, "Erika's presentations touch upon other issues pertinent to youth, such as violence prevention and bullying."

Harold, who as Miss America 2003, will travel 20,000 miles each month to advocate her social cause, seems to have embraced this strategy not just to win the coveted tiara, but to eventually attain public office. Immediately after September's pageant, in a National Review piece called "The 'Right' Miss America," conservative columnist Joel Mowbray wrote, "Ironically, Harold thought of quitting pageant life a year ago, convinced that judges would never crown an outspoken conservative as Miss Illinois. She told me two months before the state pageant that she strongly doubted she would win the state title, let alone the national one."

Mowbray goes on to comment on Harold switching to a youth violence platform for the national contest, saying "here's why Harold will shine as a politician: She is cunning enough to know that you can't talk to teens about violence without discussing the risk factors that contribute to dangerous behavior: drugs, alcohol -- and teen sex."

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