Brattleboro....Again!

The Brattleboro Selectboard once again takes up the discussion of an anti-nudity ordinance at its meeting tonight. Ironically, a town that does not want to be known for public nudity brings back the media circus.

None of this wrangling really makes any sense, especially when you consider that only a very small amount of people have actually gone naked in the town, and some of them only bared their hides because of all the publicity in the first place.

Attempting to define nudity, and/or to restrict it from certain geographical areas, is a slippery slope that solves nothing, and only further complicates the matter. For example, the baring of female breasts would be prohibited, but breastfeeding mothers would be exempt. On the face, this would appear to be unconstitutional on the grounds that it discriminates against women who do not have children, or those who might wish to be topfree and share equal rights with any man who wishes to remove his shirt in public.

Selectboard Vice Chairman Dick DeGray wants to lock up anyone who defies an order to cover up. "If you want to have the thing be effective there has to be more than just getting a ticket." Others on the board are more reasonable and do not wish to make nudity a criminal offense.

"I'm not willing to make it a criminal issue," said Selectboard member Rich Garant, who has opposed any anti-nudity ordinance in the past. There are already laws in place, he said, to deal with nudity or related behavior if it gets out of control, such as disorderly conduct and lewd and lascivious behavior.

But, said Garant, this may be the time to enact such a regulation because of the amount of time spent discussing nudity in Brattleboro when the town has more pressing issues to deal with, such as budgeting for next year.

"Why are we spending time on this for something that has very little to do with public safety or public morals?" asked Garant.

This is something I have noted many times on this blog - that politicians will almost always err on the side of caution when it comes to issues of morality. The solution is to drop the issue if it's taking up too much valuable time. Passing an unnecessary ordinance merely to take the issue off the table is not only irresponsible and lazy, it's dangerous in the sense that it further erodes our natural freedoms for the sake of convenience.

The Selectboard should consider what I stated in my post earlier this week:

"A definite social evil" should be the criterion for determining whether or not an action of a government or any of its agents is justified in enforcing "societal norms".

Is public nudity a true and overwhelming social evil, or is it merely a small inconvenience that has been blown out of proportion? The answer seems clear, that nobody has been harmed in Brattleboro, that the real damage to the town has been self-inflicted by the politicians who are bowing to pressure from a few Christianists who want to impose their religious beliefs into a secular political process. Wake up Brattleboro, the human body is not a social evil, but limiting the personal freedoms of individuals most definitely is.

Tags: nudism, naturism, nudist, nudists, naturist, naturists, nudity, nudes, bare, au naturel, nude, naked