Some might remember when five women from Ocean City, Maryland filed a lawsuit against their city back in 2017. They wanted to know why they could not sunbathe topless on the beach, since men are allowed to do so. The City Council responded by passing an emergency resolution to keep the ban in place.
The City Council said that the ban needed to remain in place so that they could continue the process of “preserving and protecting the character of Ocean City and the moral sensibilities of its residents and visitors.” Once the women took the case to court, Judge James Bredar ruled that the ban was not constitutional. The ruling was appealed by the plaintiffs and now the matter has made its way to federal appeals court.
CBS Baltimore has more: “The fight for women to go topless in Maryland’s most popular beach town is back in court. A federal appeals court has heard arguments from advocates who want to overturn Ocean City’s ordinance that bans women from going topless. A ruling was made last year to uphold the 2017 law that made nudity a municipal infraction punishable by a $1,000 fine.”
The federal court has a long road around of them if the lower court’s ruling is going to be successfully upheld. Judge Bredar had to jump through a number of hoops to make the ordinance seem unconstitutional. “Whether or not society should differentiate between male and female breasts is a separate inquiry from whether it is constitutional to do so,” Bredar wrote.
“Physical differences between men and women provide a constitutionally sound basis for laws that treat men and women differently,” the judge continued at the time. While this may have been true in the past, times change and the laws need to change with them. Now that women are being allowed to serve in combat roles just like men, it is harder and harder to uphold outdated laws.
The “free the nipple” controversy is also based on purely moral judgments, as the usual examples do not really apply here. This is about people who simply want to relax in the sun and there is nothing pornographic about it. If revealing a nipple in public is going to cause this much of an issue, guess what? There are lot of famous statues in numerous museums that will soon need to come down for good.
Let’s be real here. When we were kids, we just took the idea that women would always keep their breasts covered for granted. We assumed that it was okay to let men be topless, while women had to remain covered up. In reality, this is a massive double standard. Judge Bredar believes that exceptions should be made for “areas of the body traditionally viewed as erogenous zones,” but this is not something that we believe in either.
Think about it this way: we have seen lots of women swooning over shirtless men on social media. There is an obvious level of appreciation here for both sexes and that’s why the laws need to be updated to reflect the times. The federal appeals court cannot continue to make these types of distinctions with a straight face.
These questions become more and more pertinent as the transgender revolution continues. It is harder and harder to tell one gender that they need to be covering up when we are not even supposed to be differentiating between the genders. This is a memo that the courts need to be getting behind as soon as possible.
We are building to the inevitable: women are going to go topless and simply tell the court that they identify as men. When this happens, we are going to be sitting in the front row with our popcorn at the ready. This seems like as good of a place as any to issue our closing remarks. In summation, this is a protest that we are more than happy to get behind.
