Author: Tim Mullins

While our outside activities are turning to International Skinny Dip Day and other Nude Recreation Week activities, GAT is still following bills we’ve been concerned about since January. As the legislative year progresses more states have ended their sessions or for those with longer sessions, restricted or stopped new legislative proposals. That’s fine, we already have more than enough to watch.

Your regional teams have done a great job of representing our position to the authors and supporters of bills that we felt needed attention. Now that conventions and more group activities are happening in the clubs take time to attend update sessions on what bills were introduced in your neck of the woods or in the areas you like to visit nude.

Not everyone can sit down and write a letter to articulate their displeasure or support for a particular bill or suggest language to guarantee their personal freedoms are not infringed by a well-meaning legislator’s poorly written bill. That said, we can all contact our elected officials and say we want them to know our position on any proposed bill or law change. We should learn who our representatives are at every level of government if we don’t already know.

It’s great to have places to relax nude. Public lands are there for a lot of us to use. We need to make sure those lands and the private clubs we enjoy are protected for our nude use. This year we have seen a rise in the number of bills that seek to restrict personal activities on public and private lands that others perceive as dangerous or immoral. Simple nudity is one of those things, as well as ‘activities where males and females are together in a state of undress’, water volleyball comes to mind as one such activity. There has also been a strong push this year to get our 5K and 10 K runs advertised to larger audience, those too could become problematic.

These are the things we end up sharing with legislators when they introduce bills and this year many times our concerns fell on deaf ears. Now we find ourselves going forward with bad laws just waiting to be challenged at considerable expense to those innocent nudists who will get caught up when enforcement proceeds on these poorly written laws.

I’d like to thank the people who responded to my Diversity column in the April Bulletin. The purpose of the Government Affairs Team is to protect nudists privileges from undo attacks. The way legislation is written many times allows a bill that seemingly has no connection to nudist activities to be applied to them due to the vagueness of the law as written.

 

My concern with legislation targeting drag performances is linked to that vagueness. Especially when it comes to ‘Venues where children might be present’. First, it’s clear there are differences of opinion on what happens at drag shows and what the content of those shows may be. I am not advocating allowing children to see sexually provocative performances of any nature, whether drag or straight. AANR’s mission is clear, we promote wholesome nude recreation. The point I was making is closely tied to a phrase I heard in some of the replies to my column. ‘Mission creep’, that is also what happens when well-meaning laws get applied to nudist venues. The reason we may oppose a bill that seems to have no direct bearing on nudists is that same mission creep when it comes to overzealous interpretations of phrases within a law.

 

We support efforts of the top-free community to equalize laws concerning bare chests between the sexes because that equality helps normalize exposure to the human body without sexualizing it. There are still laws outlawing breast feeding in public areas because of the sexualization of an exposed female breast for any reason. We should be able to understand that simple exposure is not a moral dilemma.

 

World Naked Bike Rides (WNBR) were originally a protest against fossil fuels and global warming. That is still part of the conversation but many of the interviews I have seen with participants focused on the ability to be naked in a nonsexual environment. Participants wanted to be able to ride their bikes uninhibited by clothes. The comradery of the event is exhilarating to the participants. The rise in the number of WNBRs is an outgrowth of that acceptance of nude protests.

 

We are clear on AANR’s mission to promote wholesome nude recreation in appropriate settings. We do this by working where we can to normalize the joys of nude recreation, and away from shaming for celebrating the diversity of our bodies, to the general public.

I’m pretty sure legislators didn’t have World Naked Gardening Day in mind when they decided to sow a bumper crop of new bills this year. But here we are facing a year where the growth of attacks on our nudist lifestyle is alarming.

The number of bills needing attention has grown exponentially this year. It’s the case in even numbered years we get a slew of new legislators who feel the need to make their mark by introducing what they see as important legislation. The problem is they frequently write broad legislation to address narrow issues. Our goal is to point out how their language negatively impacts our nudist venues, events, or desires.

Popular themes of restricting legislation never really say they are trying to impose their values on others, they are cloaked in titles that sound like they are upholding or broadening freedoms, or embellishing on popular themes.

Titles like “Think of the Children,” or “Parents Rights Protection Act”, along with changing text from “harmful to minors” (which has been in use in case law at least since the 1960’s) to “not educationally suitable” is somewhat suspect. Much like the change from using the term “child pornography” to “child sex abuse materials”, we are leaving established precedent to come up with new vague terms that will need to either be defined in the new law, and then challenged in court to define what the new terms actually mean, rather than stick with the verbiage that has already passed muster.

The reason for this is clear. More oversight of private activities by whatever authority the laws designate as the enforcing agency, or in some cases the expansion of policing power to anyone who feels offended by an action whether it affects them or not. One such troubling bill is Arizona SB1698, legislation introduced at the end of January newly defines “adult oriented performance” to include simple nudity, and it criminalizes those who allow minors to remain where such is taking place. Simple nudity in Arizona being criminalized should be a call to arms for all nudists, not just those in Arizona. AANR needs our members fighting to show their legislators we don’t want further intrusions on our right to assemble with like-minded nudists.