Last Shabbos's Naked Bike Ride To Ban Milah

A Person Trying To Ban Bris Milah in Naked Bike Ride

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Police Told Not To Arrest Women With Out Tops (Shirts) On

In the cold of February, as New York City police officers gathered for their daily orders at roll call, they were given a rather unusual command, for both its timing and its substance: If they happened upon a topless woman, they were not to arrest her. 

The command was read at 10 consecutive roll calls. Each of the city’s 34,000 officers, in theory, got the message: For “simply exposing their breasts in public,” women are guilty of no crime. 

Whether any officer encountered such a brave-hearted, bare-chested soul is not clear, nor is the reason for the Police Department’s concern about such matters in the dead of winter. 

One possible explanation lies in the person of Holly Van Voast, a Bronx photographer and performance artist known for baring her breasts. 

The order was disclosed in an official memorandum contained in a federal lawsuit Ms. Van Voast filed on Wednesday against the city and the department. The memo makes clear that bare-breasted women should not be cited for public lewdness, indecent exposure or any other section of the penal law. 

Even if the topless display draws a lot of attention, officers are to “give a lawful order to disperse the entire crowd and take enforcement action” against those who do not comply, the memo says. “Whether the individuals are clothed is not a factor in making a determination about whether the above-mentioned crowd conditions exist.” 

The suit lists 10 episodes in 2011 and 2012 in which the police detained, arrested or issued summonses to Ms. Van Voast, 46, for baring her breasts at sites that included the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Terminal, in front of a Manhattan elementary school, on the A train and outside a Hooters restaurant in Midtown. That last episode, the suit says, ended with her being taken by the police to a nearby hospital for a psychiatric evaluation. 

Each complaint against her was dismissed or dropped, her lawyers said, for one simple reason: The state’s highest court ruled more than two decades ago that baring one’s chest in public — for noncommercial activity — is perfectly legal for a woman, as it is for a man. 

But when Ms. Van Voast’s top came off again this year, her lawyers said, what had seemed to be an annual rite of spring did not follow. “I was aware that they stopped telling her to put a shirt on, stopped arresting her, stopped carting her off to mental institutions,” Ronald L. Kuby, one of her lawyers, said. “But I was not aware why.” 

The memo does not allude to its origin, and a department spokeswoman declined to discuss what had precipitated it. The spokeswoman, Inspector Kim Y. Royster, said such memos were “periodically circulated to remind personnel of our policies.” She added that it “comports with the N.Y.S. Court of Appeals ruling on taking enforcement action against individuals for public nudity.”

The memo’s language is as clear as it is legalistic. Officers “shall not enforce any section of law, including penal law sections 245.00 (public lewdness) and 245.01 (exposure of a person) against female individuals who are simply exposing their breasts in public.” 

Katherine Rosenfeld, a lawyer at Emery Celli Brinckerhoff & Abady who is also representing Ms. Van Voast, saw a direct connection between the memo and her client’s public performances, often done in the character of a mustachioed “topless paparazzo” called Harvey Van Toast. “It establishes that they’ve been in error in all the times that they’ve charged her,” she said. 

Ms. Van Voast, in her lawsuit, is seeking compensation from the city as well as punitive damages from several named and unnamed officers for her treatment, which the suit alleges constituted civil rights violations.

The memo reminds the officers that there are still times when they can detain, arrest or give tickets to women or men for being indecent in public — “if the actions of any individual rise to the level of a lewd act (e.g. masturbation, simulated sexual act), regardless of whether the individual is clothed above their waist,” or if the person is naked below the waist “and is not entertaining or performing in a play, exhibition, show or entertainment.” 

Of a dozen patrol officers from precincts around the city interviewed on Wednesday, nearly all correctly cited the law on toplessness, though none would describe roll call discussions. Each declined to be quoted by name, citing departmental policy. 

“It was told to us,” one said. “But I don’t remember if it was at roll call or in a conversation like this.”

Another said he remembered hearing last summer that “it’s legal to be topless if you’re a man or a woman.”

“I thought you had to have body paint,” a female officer said.

“No,” the first replied. “You don’t need that.” 

(New York Times)

If our "askoniem" are truly looking out for us how come in the past 20 years not 1 politician tried to fix this major problem!

Anti Bris Milah Group To Ride Naked In Williamsburg

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FCC Wants To Allow More Nudity On TV

If We Fought things like this we wouldn't need an assifa every year!

written by Penny Young Nance
I think you would agree: today’s television programming already goes far enough — too far, in fact.
Hollywood shock jocks have successfully snuck in more sex, violence, and profanity, making it hard for parents to find “smut-free” zones on the public airwaves suitable for their families.
The last thing we need is more filth and vulgarity.
Even though 75 percent of Americans want more Federal Communications Commission (FCC) restrictions on public television content, the FCC is considering dropping current broadcast decency standards that ban explicit profanity and “non-sexual” nudity.

By age 18, an American teenager will have seen 16,000 simulated murders and 200,000 acts of violence

With America already undergoing a huge indecency problem, it’s unfathomable to think the FCC actually wants to allow more filth such as frontal female nudity, the F-bomb, and the “S” word on broadcast television during hours when our kids will be watching and listening.

Evidently, the F-bomb and other obscenities are more common in the nation’s vernacular, but I know that parents of young kids work hard to shield them from picking up vulgarities.

When I served as Special Advisor for then-FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, I constantly received comments from moms and dads who were fed up and rightly so.

Raunchy images and lewd gestures steal our children’s innocence. By age 18, an American teenager will have seen 16,000 simulated murders and 200,000 acts of violence, according to the American Psychiatric Association. And the Parents Television Council reports that these vast amounts of graphic images and obscenity are causing long term and irreparable damage, including desensitization, disrespect for parents, and a lack of empathy for human suffering.

Parents do have a responsibility to protect their children from obscenity. And ideally, parents would have the sole authority and power to monitor the airwaves. But that just isn’t our reality.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, children 8 to18 years old consume a total of seven hours and 38 minutes of screen time every day — more than the time they spend at school!

Half of these children live in households with absolutely zero restrictions on the media they consume, and a mere five percent of parents actually watch the programs their children are watching.

Additionally, today’s digital world has fostered a generation of kids more tech savvy than their parents, and they can easily maneuver around parental blocks on televisions.

However, even if the blocking system is firmly in place, the individual show ratings are given by the networks themselves and often do not meet the criteria set by parents.

Live sports shows in which players drop expletives will never be caught by filters, which is why the networks need to feel the pressure to institute the good old thirty-second-delay feature.  Parents have limited choices, but we must not give up.

Parental responsibility also does not acquit corporate decorum. Broadcasters are given free license to broadcast, and in exchange, are simply required to meet minimal standards of conduct. In fact, the FCC’s authority is so limited that it can only regulate public television from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m.

Because parents — the public — own these airwaves, shouldn’t we have some say over how they’re used? The answer is “of course!” And ratings speak volumes.

Profit incentives are found in wholesome family entertainment. Consider the History Channel’s ground-breaking series, “The Bible.” This dramatization of the Gospel opened with a two-hour premier that garnered a record-breaking 13.1 million viewers. By the end of the series’ run, the History Channel was the top cable network in total viewership. This level of success is not unusual for Christian productions.

In 2004, the commercial blockbuster, “The Passion” raked in $611,899,420 in ticket sales worldwide.
Hollywood needs to pay attention.

Other top-rated family shows include Fox’s “American Idol” and A&E’s “Duck Dynasty,” which broke records recently when 9.6 million viewers tuned in for the show's final episode.

May 20 is the cut-off date set by the FCC to receive the public’s feedback on its consideration to slash its broadcast decency standards. You’d better believe they’ll be hearing from my organization, Concerned Women for America Legislative Action Committee, as we engage the FCC and move to the front lines of the fight to protect America’s children and families with our “Stop the FCC” petition. We already have 12,000 signatures from concerned parents and grandparents across the nation.

The FCC is failing America’s families, giving broadcasters unfettered access to our children to peddle their vulgarity in the name of “freedom of speech.” We won’t stand for it.
For more on the "Stop the FCC" petition visit http://www.cwalac.org/stopthefcc.shtml.
Penny Young Nance is president and CEO of Concerned Women for America. 

(fox news)