U.S. District Judge R. Brooke Jackson said Tuesday that Fort Collins\u2019 ordinance is based on gender discrimination and issued an injunction against its enforcement.<\/p>\n
Fort Collins\u2019 indecency code makes it a crime for women but not men to show their nipples. The law \u201cperpetuates a stereotype engrained in our society that female breasts are primarily objects of sexual desire, whereas male breasts are not,\u201d Jackson wrote.<\/p>\n
Jackson accused city councilors of falling prey to discriminatory thinking when they voted in 2015 to keep a law that prohibits the display of female breasts.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe naked female breast is seen as disorderly or dangerous because society, from Renaissance paintings to Victoria\u2019s Secret commercials, has conflated female breasts with genitalia and stereotyped them as such,\u201d Jackson wrote.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe irony is that by forcing women to cover up their bodies, society has made naked women\u2019s breasts something to see.\u201d<\/p>\n
The hometown of Colorado State University had no cases on record of women being charged with the crime of going topless.<\/p>\n
And the city did make an exception for nursing mothers.<\/p>\n
But otherwise it was a $250 fine for a woman over the age of 10 in Fort Collins to display her breast \u201cbelow the top of the nipple.\u201d<\/p>\n
Two women sued over the Fort Collins topless ban. Other cities in Colorado, including Denver, have no gender-specific indecency laws.<\/p>\n
The plaintiffs\u2019 lawyer, David Lane, said Tuesday that he wasn\u2019t surprised the judge blocked Fort Collins\u2019 law.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy clients take a position that any statute with the words \u2018Women are prohibited from.\u2019 is unconstitutional, and I agree with them. Apparently so does a federal judge,\u201d Lane said in a statement Tuesday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
U.S. District Judge R. Brooke Jackson said Tuesday that Fort Collins\u2019 ordinance is based on gender discrimination and issued an injunction against its enforcement. Fort Collins\u2019 indecency code makes it a crime for women but not men to show their nipples. The law \u201cperpetuates a stereotype engrained in our society that female breasts are primarily […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[120,3885],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-71696","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-colorado","tag-gender-equality"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71696"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71696\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71696"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=71696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}