Boobie Trap: Will The Go Topless Movement Take Off?

Thursday is the 50th anniversary of the Martin Luther King Jr’s March on Washington and his landmark “I have a dream” speech.  Yesterday, thousands of people descended to Washington to commemorate the historic event and celebrate the progress we have made toward racial equality.

Tomorrow is the 42nd annual Women’s Equality Day, a designation created by a Joint Resolution of Congress in 1971 at the behest of Congresswoman Bella Abzug of New York to commemorate the ratification of the 19th amendment which gave women the right to vote.  The 19th Amendment was ratified on August 18, 1920.

GoTopless.org seeks to make a woman’s right to go topless part of the American Dream.  Since 2007, when their spiritual leader Rael founded the organization, GoTopless has held an International GoTopless Day on the Sunday closest to August 26.  That’s today this year. GoTopless is holding rallies in 51 cities around the world. In many of those cities, and in most states in the United States, going topless is already legal, according to the organization’s own map.

Today in New York City, where the right to go topless was degreed by a Court decision in 1996 and reaffirmed in 2007 when Phoenix Feeley won a $29,000 Judgment against the City for her wrongful 2005 arrest for going topless, Go Topless advocates are marching from Bryant Park to Times Square and back.  Street vendors should stock up on sunscreen and hydrocortisone.

Here in New Jersey, Feeley’s recent efforts fell, umm, flat.  She got herself arrested for going topless, twice in the same day, in Spring Lake in 2008, fought her conviction of violating Spring Lake’s anti-nudity ordinance up to the NJ Supreme Court and lost.  Rather than pay her $816 fine, Feeley went to Monmouth County Jail and staged a hunger strike.  A GoTopless organized protest drew two fully clothed women. Feeley was released early and healthy.

At the March on Washington celebration yesterday, women kept their tops on.

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A Knock At Midnight

Moral principles have lost their distinctiveness. For modern man, absolute right and wrong are a matter of what the majority is doing. Right and wrong are relative to likes and dislikes and the customs of a particular community. We have unconsciously applied Einstein’s theory of relativity, which properly described the physical universe, to the moral and ethical realm. . . . This mentality has brought a tragic breakdown of moral standards, and the midnight of moral degeneration deepens.

~ Reverand Martin Luther King, JR,  A Knock at Midnight

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I Have a Dream

By Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, as delivered at the Lincoln Memorial, August 28, 1963

I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.

But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. And so we’ve come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.

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