As Radley Balko says, WTF?
Williamson denied standing naked in his doorway or front window and said he had no intent to expose himself to anyone. But [Judge] O’Flaherty wasn’t buying it and likened Williamson to bank robber John Dillinger, who also “thought he was doing nothing wrong when he walked into banks and shot them up.”
Anyhow, consider this an open thread. Discuss what you like, when you like, with whom you like, wearing the clothes you like, noshing on the food you like. You can even do it naked in your own home; I promise not to call the cops on you.
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Media Doesn’t Get Why Left Is Upset With Obama
Our anger is not rooted in our naivete, or our idealism. It’s rooted in our realism. We know that when you fight for something in politics, you can very often win. But if you don’t fight, you’ll never win. We are upset at the President and the Congress because no one fought for the public option, for the President’s own campaign promise.
One reason I won’t give a cent toward’s Obama’s re-election campaign. This isn’t politically necessary; it’s Obama’s administration acting like homophobic assholes. I honestly don’t know if they’re acting from deep-seated cowardice or from pure bigotry, but in either case they’re breaking every promise they ever made about LGBT rights.
The habit of insisting that only the right and the left have “ideologies” and that people in the center don’t is one of the absolute most frustrating elements of conventional political discussion in the United States. The fact of the matter is that “centrist” ideological taboos have been the big story of the Obama administration. That starts with the imposition of an arbitrary cap on the size of the stimulus bill, it continues to the utterly merciless and fanatical centrist opposition to the existence of any public option, to the Fed’s refusal to undertake further monetary easing, to the unwillingness to contemplate really stern measures against bailed-out banks and their executives, and on and on and on.
Anyone seen this yet? It’s quite the ruling. Soldiers who become pregnant can be court martialed? No word on whether exceptions are made for those becoming pregnant through rape. Probably not. According to this article the rule is probably legal, though I can’t see how.
The only “centrists” in the US government are men who can’t afford to follow left-wing or right-wing political lines because doing so would compromise their commitments to their lobbyists.
I thought the judge’s John Dillinger metaphor was in reference to brandishing a pistol.
More focus on blackface. Or not.
HP’s cameras are racially insensitive.
Does anybody have a “Credo: The Game of Dueling Dogmas”? Can I get it from you?
If a person is unclothed in his own house and not standing directly in front of an open window or door and someone sees him, doesn’t that mean that he is the victim of a peeping tom?
Sam the patriotic eagle muppet provides sound moral guidance on nudity:
(okay, so it’s pretty low humor . . . but whaddya expect from the muppets)
I don’t know that just being in your house matters as a defense. I once had a case of a guy who would yell at women from his bedroom window and then when they looked, up he would whip out his penis.
The issue is really whether whether he was displaying himself to passers-by intentionally. (The comments to the post you link have more information about the elements of the offense.)
The WaPo article (linked in the post you linked to) mentions that the woman with her little boy heard some sort of rattling noise, turned and saw naked guy standing at his front door with the door in all is glory. She threw a coat over her kid’s face and then looked back and see him still standing there naked as he made eye contact with her.
Granted, that alone wouldn’t be enough for me to conclude his actions were intentional, but I don’t think it is necessarily cut-and-dry. Depending on what exactly was presented in court, a reasonable fact-finder might be able to find him guilty. You could conclude that no one in that kind of setting would open his front door while naked just while a woman was passing by unless he intended to be seen — particularly since he did not make any apparent move to withdraw or cover himself when he realized someone was there.