|
SCNA NUDIST FORUM
Return to Nudist Forum Menu |
NUDIST FAMILY VALUES
This editorial won Best Original Article in a Club Newsletter for 2008, awarded by the American
Association for Nude Recreation (AANR) at its national convention in August of that year.
Reprinted with permission.
Each time I hear a news commentator or politician preach about “family values” I cringe.
It is scary sometimes how so many of us want the power to impose our own sense of morality onto others around us.
Nudists have been an especially easy target of these attacks over the years as people who just don’t get us try to save our children from our “den of sexual and moral depravity” or something like that. Some of these meddlers are well-meaning, and some just want to save us to get reelected.
What brought these thoughts to the forefront was everyone’s nominee for Mother of the Year, Britney Spears. If you read her story this month you will find a young woman who seems out of control and, according to these same pundits and politicians, ill-equipped for the responsibilities of parenthood. She doesn’t seem to know how to drive, dress, or drink responsibly.
Yet all of her antics recently have occurred when her kids are tucked in bed under the supervision of the nanny. So what if she skinny-dips, cavorts with friends and lovers, or thinks a shirt is a dress? Is this how I would act, or is it what I would do? Of course not, and we can smirk and shake our heads. But the point is she gets to make those choices, and raise her kids as she chooses, because I want that right also.
If a parent wants their kids to be home schooled and go to church every day, they get to do that. And, in the extreme (according to my values) if a Muslim parent wants to raise their daughters to wear a burka, they get to do that also because I want the right to send my kids to an AANR Youth Camp every summer.
Have no doubt, when kids reach 18 they probably will rebel against their parent’s beliefs and find their own moral path – just as Britney is doing now for herself. Whether sitting around naked in Brattlesboro, Vermont, or pushing their baggy pants down to their crotch, or wearing baseball caps in reverse, these are all part of growing up. Of course Britney’s errors are magnified because of the cameras recording her every waking minute. How many fashion and social faux pas errors did you make growing up, or raising your kids, and would you want all of them on film?
I just don’t want someone else deciding for me that I am a bad person or a bad parent – or that I am endangering my children – just because my moral compass points in a different direction than someone else’s.