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STATE HONORS
2003 NATIONAL MERIT FINALISTS
Ardmore Joshua Smart
Bethany Kyndall Rothaus
Broken Arrow Mark Eschmann
Edmond Lauren Major
Norman Robert Rucker
Oklahoma City Chris Waters
OCPA'S 2003 CITIZENSHIP ESSAY CONTEST
Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs encourages students "to think about an important
issue of the day and articulate these thoughts on paper." This year's essay question
was: "Discuss what freedoms, if any, ought to be sacrificed for the sake of security
in America today, and why these freedoms should or should not be given up." More than
200 essays came from 38 counties. OCPA officials said the winning entries "were
downright inspiring." OCPA presented a total of $10,000 to five student winners.
Second place winner Caleb Harlin, a home schooler from Muskogee, answered
the challenging essay topic with a Jeffersonian formulation: "By its very definition,
the unalienable right has to be the one that remains un-alienated. Therefore, any freedom
that is sacrificed for the sake of security in America today must be a freedom that exists
outside the reaches of all unalienable rights, thereby preserving, venerating, and
buttressing all such rights." Harlin was presented $2,500 for his essay.
Kyndall Rothaus, a Bethany home school student, won the third place prize
of $2,000. Rothaus asked, rhetorically, "Those who died in the battle following July
4, 1776, gave their lives in order to gain liberty. Those who died on September 11, 2001,
were killed for their possession of liberty. Will we dishonor them all by voluntarily
abandoning that same liberty?"
Another home school student, Ashlie Campbell of Moore, won 4th prize and
$1,500, remarking in her commentary: "We, as a free people, must not allow our
vision, though blinded by tears of grief and anger, to be blurred so that we allow the
very things that define our great country and bind us together to be severed and
lost."
The Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs is the state's leading organization promoting Free
Enterprise and Limited Government in Oklahoma. See their website, www.ocpathink.org, for
the full text of winning essays.
Excerpts printed from Patrick B. McGuigan's Tulsa Today article, "Watts Lauds
Liberty, Young Essay Winners," March 24, 2003
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