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Political journalist Alexander Cockburn (pronounced CO-burn) began his career at the University of Oxford, working as a reporter and commentator in...
Read more about Alexander Cockburn.
Political journalist Alexander Cockburn (pronounced CO-burn) began his career at the University of Oxford, working as a reporter and commentator in...
Read more about Alexander Cockburn.
The Right To Remain Naked?
Alexander Cockburn
Just how funny was that story of the man in Fairfax County, Va., who
got up early on Monday morning, Oct. 19, walked naked into his own
kitchen to make himself a cup of coffee? The next significant thing
that happed to 29-year-old Eric Williamson is the local cops arriving
to charge him with indecent exposure. It turns out that while he was
brewing the coffee, a mother was taking her 7-year-old son along a
path beside Williamson's house, spied the naked Williamson and called
the local precinct, or more likely her husband, who turns out to be a
cop.
"Yes, I wasn't wearing any clothes," Williamson said later, "but I was alone, in my own home and just got out of bed. It was dark and I had no idea anyone was outside looking in at me."
The story ended up on TV, starting with Fox, and in the opening rounds, the newscasters and network blogs had merciless sport with the Fairfax police for their absurd behavior. Hasn't a man the right to walk around his own home (or in this case, rented accommodations) dressed according to his fancy? Answer, obvious to anyone familiar with relevant case law, absolutely not.
Peeved by public ridicule, the Fairfax cops turned up the heat. The cop's wife started to maintain that first she saw Williamson by a glass kitchen door, then through the kitchen window. Mary Ann Jennings, a Fairfax County Police spokesperson, stirred the pot of innuendo: "We've heard there may have been other people who had a similar incident." The cops are asking anyone who may have seen an unclothed Williamson through his windows to come forward, even if it was at a different time. They've also been papering the neighborhood with fliers, asking for reports on any other questionable activities by anyone resembling Williamson -- a white guy who's a former diver, and who has a 5-year-old daughter, not living with him.
I'd say that if the cops keep it up, and some prosecutor scents opportunity, Williamson will be pretty lucky if they don't throw some cobbled-up indictment at him. Toss in a jailhouse snitch making his own plea deal, a faked police lineup, maybe an artist's impression of the Fairfax Flasher, and Williamson could end up losing his visitation rights and, worst comes to worst, getting 10 years plus posted for life on some sex offender site. You think we're living in the 21st century, in the clinical fantasy world of "CSI"? Wrong. So far as forensic evidence is concerned, we remain planted in the 17th century with trial by ordeal such as when they killed women as witches if they floated when thrown into a pond.
Let's head north from Fairfax County to Massachusetts, home of the witch trials. How about if you're white in Boston (wise decision), weigh yourself in your own bedroom with no clothes on and. ... But let my Boston friend pick up the story because it happened to him.
"It was the early '90s. Early on Xmas eve two burly cops pushed into our house and invaded our bedroom -- no warrant. They only backed off after they realized that the scale in our bedroom where I weighed myself was in front of a window. To see me there the born-agains who moved in next door (actually on the far side of a vacant lot separating us) had to keep a tight watch since it does not take long to weigh oneself.
"My girlfriend was dressing in the bedroom and my mom and stepdaughter were visiting. By the time the cops understood that I had been weighing myself every morning, the paddy wagon was there ready to take me away.
"I would have sued them but I was running for Congress at the time. The cops liked my opponent, a right-wing pro-lifer, and I have always thought that had something to do with their moral diligence that day. One of the cops, the chief, later resigned in a corruption scandal."
Now this was in the early 1990s, please note. This was when the wave of hysteria over satanic abuse of children was in full spate with people being imprisoned for life on just the sort of "evidence" the cops are now trying to marshal against Williamson. Massachusetts actually saw the first trial of a daycare teacher charged with satanic abuse. Bernard Baran was released after 22 years and exonerated three years after that, on June 9 of this year.
As the attorney Mike Snedeker, who co-authored with Debbie Nathan the 1998 book "Satan's Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt," recently reminded us on the CounterPunch website, there are victims of that hysteria, almost certainly innocent, still rotting in prison: Fran and Danny Keller in Texas; James Toward and Francisco Fuster in Florida almost a generation later.
Earlier this year, Nancy Smith, a schoolteacher, and Joseph Allen, a Head Start bus driver, were released from Ohio prisons after serving 14 years for committing phantom crimes against 5-year-olds. John Stoll -- convicted of allowing people he barely knew to sodomize his 6-year-old son, and himself sodomizing young children he had just met and then sending them on home after school-was released in 2004 after 20 years in state prison. He is featured in the documentary "Witch Hunt," narrated by Sean Penn, and recently settled a civil rights suit against Kern County, Calif., for $5.5 million.
Among the many brilliant observations of Morse Peckham in his 1969 book, "Art and Pornography" (published by the Kinsey Institute) was that the concern with sexual behavior has nothing to do with sex but everything to do with policing. American sexual prudery is part of political and social policing within the nominally legal context of supposed individual freedom. People learn to be prudish with sex before they understand anything else in society and this prudery is transferred to other areas later, which are even more important for social control and stability.
The control of sex and pornography is a major part of promulgating a puritanical political culture without ever imposing an overt political censorship regime. Sexual repression, through the allegation of "deviant" fantasy crimes, is often the designated stand-in for violations of the social order harder to stand up in court.
========
Alexander Cockburn is co-editor with Jeffrey St. Clair of the muckraking newsletter CounterPunch. He is also co-author of the new book "Dime's Worth of Difference: Beyond the Lesser of Two Evils," available through www.counterpunch.com. To find out more about Alexander Cockburn and read features by other columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
Copyright 2009 Creators Syndicate Inc.
This news arrived on: 10/30/2009
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Posted Comments:
10-31-2009 18:28
old cowboy wrote:
Totally irrelevant
Subject line says it all
10-31-2009 15:09
JCE wrote:
Usually it is the far right that is offended by someone doing something they have every right to do in the privacy of their own home. The far left is too busy doing it. Witch hunters and moral hypocrites are much more often from the far right. Those are just simple facts, not attacks. The left would be far more likely raising heck about their right to be naked in public. The right is far more likely to raise heck about someone being naked period. Original sin kind of nonsense. I believe casey42 has hit at the heart of it. While many of us believe that God invented beauty when he made the human body, many on the right, and far to many religious people seem to be ashamed or afraid of that beauty. A person shouldn't have to worry about whether some peeping tom is at his window. That is getting ridiculous. A little care is one thing, but this moral prudery forcing others to act a certain way is just rape like behavior. Forcing their silly ideas on everyone else. They need to get a life, and a clue.
Tim Why attack me? I believe as you do. The human body is beautiful. I think you have the right to be a nudist. It is the moral fools that would deny you that right that bother me. I only call people right wingers for wanting to take peoples rights and freedoms from them. Sounds like you are the opposite. I agree with your post totally.
Tim Why attack me? I believe as you do. The human body is beautiful. I think you have the right to be a nudist. It is the moral fools that would deny you that right that bother me. I only call people right wingers for wanting to take peoples rights and freedoms from them. Sounds like you are the opposite. I agree with your post totally.
10-31-2009 14:45
Tim wrote:
JCE and casey42
Once again the two of you can not post without being on the attack. You would probably call me a right winger, however I am a nudist, and met my wife in a nudist resort. I have even lived in two nudist resorts. As a rule, when I am home I am nude. That's just the way I happen to live. When I am nude at home The curtins are closed. What I want from our government is the Democrats out of me wallet, and the Republicans out of my bedroom.
10-31-2009 13:07
MarineMom wrote:
If it is illegal to walk around in the buff in one's own home, then surely there are laws prohibiting folks -- in public -- from crouching down in their low-slung jeans so that their hindquarters are visible for all to see! Trust me on this one, friends, I have NO INTEREST in knowing what color thong the stocker at my local grocery store wears!
10-31-2009 12:37
Peter wrote:
labels as name-calling
JCE is right, why is it that someone is labeled a "right-wing extremist" for doing something goofy? Obviously, because the person labeling them wants to criticize the "right wing." Just as obviously, it would seem, in a society where it is required that people wear clothing in public, they shouldn't be allowed to stand naked in front of a window and expose themselves to people and then claim that it should be okay because they're in their own home. Pull the drapes. A Peeping Tom isn't the same things as a normal person in a public place who's flashed by someone through their own window. Try to make some reasonable distinction there.
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