because they appeared in public nude 'as a signal.

' George
Fox and other leaders defended the practice, when the doer
felt it a religious duty to do that. . . . The idea of this type of sign came seemingly from
Isaiah's walking 'naked and
barefoot three years' (Isaiah 20:2,3)." 252 The Doukhobors, a radical Christian sect, used
nudity as a social protest in
Canada in the early 1900s.253 Paul Ableman records that "In May, 1979, Emperor Bokassa .
. . a minor Central
African tyrant, arrested a high number of youngsters on charges of sedition and massacred
some of them. According to
The Guardian (London) of 18 May, 'Hundreds of women demo nude outside the prison until
the survivors
were released.'" 254
In the 1920s, as portion of a widening rebellion against genteel society, the size of bathing
suits began to
diminish. Nude beaches, reaching their peak of popularity in the 1970s, are the ultimate
result of the procedure of
social emancipation. natural state of being, and discrimination on this basis is illegal. It ought
to be equally illegal to discriminate on the in the 1970s fit this societal and historic pattern.
Examples
Contain casual nudity at Woodstock; "naked-in" demonstrations; along with a record-setting
demonstration by Athens,
Georgia university students on March 7, 1974, when more than 1500 went naked on their
college campus. It required
tear gas to produce the students clothing.255
Historical origins of the repression of nudity.
167. Repressive morality was designed by the state as well as the Church as a tool to
maintain control over
otherwise free individuals.256
Paul Ableman writes: "A complicated civilization has an enormous investment in
differentiated apparel. It is
no accident that one of the very first matters a revolutionary regime turns its attention to is
clothes. The French
Revolution decreed classical elegance and Examination could rediscover, that will reveal
how a bird could be inhibited or hurt by it except in the most . The Chinese homogenized
clothing. are, and can recreate their relationships with others as they ideally should be--open,
equivalent, and trusting. . . . Sweating in
Iran returned women to the black chador and so forth. . . . Sexual energy is needed by the
authorities of the world to
maintain order. . . . It immediately becomes obvious why the accurate obscenity of killing and
violence has consistently been
of less concern to those in power than the pseudo-obscenity of sensual acts. Death supplies
no scope for a network of

regulations by which society may be controlled. . . . But sex is a long-lasting fountain of

dynamic energy, which can
be exploited for social purposes by regulations concerning marriage, divorce, adultery,
fornication, incest,
homosexuality, bestiality, chastity, promiscuity, decency and so forth. All those who wield
power intuitively perceive
that in the last resort their authority derives from the repression, and regulation, of sexuality,
and that free-flowing
sexuality is the biological equivalent of anarchy. All transferrals of power, all revolutions, are
always
accompanied by transformations of the regulations governing sexuality." 257 Seymour Fisher
writes: "The
implications of nudity as a way of declaring one's complete freedom have often aroused
powerful countermeasures
from those in authority. Nudity is punishable by death in certain cultures. The Roman
Catholic church has taught in
convent schools that Few folks realize that swimsuits, as we know them today, are a
relatively recent concept. The notion of to expose your body even to your own eyes. The
wearing of clothes symbolizes a
Type of entry to prevailing mores. It's like putting on a 'citizen's uniform' and consenting to
play the game." 258
168. Repressive morality has frequently sought to control not only nudity, but sexuality in
general.
Margaret Miles observes that "the regulation of sexuality was a major power issue in the
fourth century
Christian churches. Management of sexual practices was a method to inject the ability of
church laws and leaders into
the intimate and day-to-day relationships of Christians. Analyzing the rules of the Council of
Gangra in AD 309,
[Samuel] Laeuchli found that 46 percent of the eighty-one rules were concerned with sexual
relationships and
practices." 259 Philip Yancey notes that "between the third and tenth centuries, church
authorities issued edicts
Prohibiting sex on Saturdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, as well as during the 40-day fast
intervals before Easter,
Christmas, and Whitsuntide--all for spiritual motives. They kept adding feast days and days
of the apostles to the
proscription, in addition to the days of female impurity, until it reached the point that, as Yale
historian John Boswell
has estimated, just 44 days a year remained available for marital sex. Human nature being
what it is, the church's
proscriptions were enthusiastically discounted." 260 Don Mackenzie notes that Christ and the
very earliest church, in
Comparison, emphasized a message of liberty--"from demonic powers, from tyrannical

authorities, from fate. . . .

[and] a prevailing dedication to the separation of secular and ecclesiastical power. . . . [The
Church] adopted
asceticism, not in compliance to its founder's teachings but as a bid for support in the face of
competition, offering
spiritual solace to people whose material world (the Roman Empire) was collapsing. Once
the Church was officially