SCOTUS May Decide On Constitutionality Of Bare Breasts In Public

Three New Hampshire women who were arrested in 2016 for doing yoga on a beach without their breasts covered have been fighting for the right to go topless in public ever since.  But after the state’s highest court ruled that the local ordinance banning public nudity in Laconia, New Hampshire, did not unfairly discriminate against women, the topless trio now say they want to bring their case to the highest court in the land, the United States Supreme Court, according to an NBC News report.   The case began in 2016 when Ginger Pierro was arrested in 2016 when beachgoers complained that she was doing yoga exercises topless. After Pierro’s arrest, two other women—Heidi Lilley and Kia Sinclair—staged a protest by visiting the same beach and removing their tops, exposing their breasts. Lilley and Sinclair were then arrested as well. The women maintain that the local ordinance violates the Constitution’s Equal Protection clause, because it singles out women for a higher level of restriction, making illegal “the showing of the female breast with less than a fully opaque covering any part of the nipple,” The New York Post reported. Men, however, are not required to cover their nipples upon removing their shirts in public locations such as the lakeside beach in Laconia. In a separate case earlier this year, as AVN.com reported, the federal 10th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed that anti-nudity laws discriminate against women. The court ruled that a Fort Collins, Colorado, ordinance banning female—but not male—toplessness was based on a stereotype that “the primary purpose of women's breasts is sex, rather than feeding babies,” according to The Lake County News Chronicle.  But the federal appeals court held that “laws grounded in stereotypes about the way women are serve no important governmental interest.” The New Hampshire state high court, went in the other direction, ruling that when it comes to definitions of nudity, the male and female genders "are not fungible,” and that the “sexual overtones” conveyed by women’s bare breasts made the ban on toplessness permissible. Now it could be up to SCOTUS to decide which court got it right—if the Supreme Court even hears the case in its upcoming fall session. A decision from the court on whether it will take up the bare breasts case is expected in early October. Photo By Fred Schilling, Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States / Wikimedia Commons Public Domain