A Colorado judge has blocked a college town’s law against women going topless, saying the law is likely unconstitutional.
US District Judge R. Brooke Jackson on Tuesday said that Fort Collins’ ordinance is based on gender discrimination and issued an injunction against its enforcement.
Fort Collins’ indecency code makes it a crime for a female over the age of 10 to display her breast “below the top of the nipple,” but not men, with violators risking a US$250 fine.
The law “perpetuates a stereotype engrained in our society that female breasts are primarily objects of sexual desire, whereas male breasts are not,” Jackson wrote.
The judge accused city council members of falling prey to discriminatory thinking when they voted unanimously in 2015 to keep a law that prohibits the display of female breasts.
“The naked female breast is seen as disorderly or dangerous because society, from Renaissance paintings to Victoria’s Secret commercials, has conflated female breasts with genitalia and stereotyped them as such,” Jackson wrote. “The irony is that by forcing women to cover up their bodies, society has made naked women’s breasts something to see.”
The hometown of Colorado State University had no cases on record of women being charged with the crime of going topless, and it did make an exception for nursing mothers, but two women sued over the ban.
The plaintiffs’ lawyer, David Lane, said that he was not surprised the judge blocked the law.
“My clients take a position that any statute with the words ‘Women are prohibited from’ is unconstitutional, and I agree with them. Apparently so does a federal judge,” Lane said in a statement.
Two medieval fortresses face each other across the Narva River separating Estonia from Russia on Europe’s eastern edge. Once a symbol of cooperation, the “Friendship Bridge” connecting the two snow-covered banks has been reinforced with rows of razor wire and “dragon’s teeth” anti-tank obstacles on the Estonian side. “The name is kind of ironic,” regional border chief Eerik Purgel said. Some fear the border town of more than 50,0000 people — a mixture of Estonians, Russians and people left stateless after the fall of the Soviet Union — could be Russian President Vladimir Putin’s next target. On the Estonian side of the bridge,
Civil society leaders and members of a left-wing coalition yesterday filed impeachment complaints against Philippine Vice President Sara Duterte, restarting a process sidelined by the Supreme Court last year. Both cases accuse Duterte of misusing public funds during her term as education secretary, while one revives allegations that she threatened to assassinate former ally Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. The filings come on the same day that a committee in the House of Representatives was to begin hearings into impeachment complaints against Marcos, accused of corruption tied to a spiraling scandal over bogus flood control projects. Under the constitution, an impeachment by the
Jeremiah Kithinji had never touched a computer before he finished high school. A decade later, he is teaching robotics, and even took a team of rural Kenyans to the World Robotics Olympiad in Singapore. In a classroom in Laikipia County — a sparsely populated grasslands region of northern Kenya known for its rhinos and cheetahs — pupils are busy snapping together wheels, motors and sensors to assemble a robot. Guiding them is Kithinji, 27, who runs a string of robotics clubs in the area that have taken some of his pupils far beyond the rural landscapes outside. In November, he took a team
Exiled Tibetans began a unique global election yesterday for a government representing a homeland many have never seen, as part of a democratic exercise voters say carries great weight. From red-robed Buddhist monks in the snowy Himalayas, to political exiles in megacities across South Asia, to refugees in Australia, Europe and North America, voting takes place in 27 countries — but not China. “Elections ... show that the struggle for Tibet’s freedom and independence continues from generation to generation,” said candidate Gyaltsen Chokye, 33, who is based in the Indian hill-town of Dharamsala, headquarters of the government-in-exile, the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA). It
RSS