Free the nipple! Minnesota Dem says women should be able to go topless after resident is jailed for indecent exposure

Minnesota Democrats are bristling at an “outdated” law that bans women from going topless in public after someone spent 90 days in jail for exposing herself at a gas station.

Eloisa Plancarte, 27, told police “Catholic girls do it all the time” when they questioned her at the Kwik Trip in Rochester in July 2021.

She appealed her conviction, claiming a man should not have been arrested because the prosecutor violated her constitutional right to equal protection under the law.

Plancarte lost the appeal last month on a narrow 2-1 decision, and Minnesota House Representative Samantha Sencer-Mura has now vowed to change the law.

“This seems really wrong to me,” she said The Star Stand‘Especially now that we as a society think differently about gender and gender identity, I think this law feels very old-fashioned.’

The representative was moved by Eloisa Plancarte’s case after she was jailed for 90 days for indecent exposure at a Rochester gas station

Protests against ‘discriminatory’ morality laws have been gaining momentum for years, including this demonstration in Minnesota in 2015

Minnesota law defines indecent exposure as an incident in which someone “intentionally and lewdly exposes the person’s body or genitals.”

But both in the US and abroad, there have been periodic protests over the fact that women’s breasts are considered private while men’s are not.

Dissenting judge Diane B Bratvold said the ruling “raises more questions about criminal behavior than it clarifies,” and that the growing prominence of transsexuals, men and women, is likely to throw further spanners in the works.

“Every year, viewers of the Academy Awards and New York Fashion Week observe a variety of fashions that expose the breasts to varying degrees,” she wrote.

“How does majority rule apply to a person whose gender identity differs from the sex assigned at birth?

‘Or to someone whose breasts have been surgically altered, which happens for a variety of reasons?

“Is a transgender woman who has not physically transformed her breasts engaging in criminal behavior if she goes topless?”

In 2020, the Supreme Court ruled that a prosecution of three women who took off their bathing suits on a New Hampshire beach did not violate their constitutional rights.

Brazilian model was arrested and threatened with a year in prison for taking off her shirt and tying it around her waist while walking her dogs next to a beach in Balneario Camboriu last year

“What should be normal for both genders ends up being denied to one of them in an arbitrary and repressive way,” she said.

Kia Sinclair (left) and Ginger Pierro (right) were arrested in 2016 after taking off their tops on a New Hampshire beach and refusing to put them on when beachgoers complained.

Heidi Lilley, Kia Sinclair and Ginger Pierro were arrested in 2016 after taking off their tops on a beach in Laconia and refusing to put them on when beachgoers complained. Pierro was doing yoga while the other two were sunbathing.

Brazilian model Caroline Werner, 37, lashed out at the country’s “patriarchal, violent culture” as she was threatened with a year in prison after going topless while walking her dog near a beach in the southern city of Balneário Camboriú.

“Unfortunately, this happens in my country, even though the constitution guarantees equality, in practice it does not,” she said.

“What should be normal for both sexes ends up being denied to one of them in an arbitrary and repressive way.”

Presiding Judge Kevin G Ross cited nearly four decades of case law in upholding Plancarte’s conviction.

“Because a woman’s fully exposed breasts are legally ‘intimate parts’ and intentionally exposing them in a supermarket parking lot amounts to intentional and indecent exposure, we reject her argument that there is insufficient evidence,” he wrote.

“And because a woman who fully exposes her breasts is not in the same situation as a man who exposes his chest, we reject her equal protection argument.”

But Sencer-Mura warned that the problem will not go away and that existing law can no longer deal with gender ambiguity.

“If police believe someone identifies as a woman, when they take off their shirt, they’re going to treat them differently than someone they identify as a man,” she said.

“As we have a shifting understanding of gender, that law simply doesn’t make sense anymore.”