Southern California Naturist Association Travel Corner

1. The Special Use Issue

Why should they get a beach of their own? The beaches are for everyone!

Look up how many municipal golf courses there are in Santa Barbara County? There are eight.
How many public parks have tennis courts on them for public use? Over a dozen.
How many bridal trails? How many bike paths? how many dog parks? Baseball diamonds? Soccer fields?

What is our point?
The county traditionally sets aside land for use by special interest groups.

With polls showing 81% approval for a nude beach set aside for that purpose, and over 1500 persons signing our petition, we believe nudists qualify for similar consideration!

2. The Property Value Issue

Having a nude beach nearby will make my property values go down!

We have searched the Internet far and wide and have we never found any study on this topic being published anywhere. We also asked some local real estate agents who are unaware of any such conclusions.

In fact, the continued high prices received for property sold at Hope Ranch here in Santa Barbara near More Mesa Beach and also at Haulover Beach in Florida and prove the opposite. Nudists are good environmentalists, who will keep the beach clean and reduce drug crime and sexual activity. How can that hurt local property values?

This charge remains a canard, made-up by the objectors, like the one from 40 years ago about black people moving into a neighborhood.

In fact, since 2000 (when the nudists left Bates Beach), census statistics show Carpinteria has suffered residential value and population losses!

According to www.bestplaces.net, as of 2009, Carpinteria's population (zip 93013) is 16,435 people. Since 2000, it has lost 3.74% of its population. Families (non-single residences) represent 66.8% of the population. The median age for residents in Carpinteria, CA is 35.9 (this is older than average age in the U.S.).

Home appreciation between 2007 and 2008 was -18.90 percent. Median price asked for vacant for-sale houses and condos in 2007 was $2,676,221. Despite the economic downturn, the average property value at Rincon Point in 2008 remains above $1.5 million.

3. The Morality Issue

Social Nudity is un-Christian and against God’s teachings"

California courts agree that nudity is not in itself sexual, despite the efforts of movies, advertisers, and some politicians to link the two. Anyone who has gone to a nude beach, resort, or club knows there is nothing sexual about the experience at all.

Review the court cases under Legal in this brief to see how the courts have refined the enforcement of anti-nudity laws on federal, state, and county lands. The 1989 California court case (California v. Bost) previously discussed set the precedent that simple beach nudity is not indecent exposure. Another court cases California vs. Smith (1972), affirmed that people would be arrested under California Penal Code Section 314 only for lewd behavior. The nudist community supports these anti-lewd behavior policies, and laws, and helps law enforcement enforce them against misbehavior on the beaches! The facts haven’t stopped certain special interest groups from trying to enforce their own version of morality on the rest of us. We support the rights of others to their own beliefs and values, even if they differ from ours. We ask the same consideration in return.

We are not forcing you to join us, or even look. Our proposed section of beach is far enough away that a person will have to want to go there.

Sheriff Deputy Darren Farthingham, then a patrol officer in 1999, told us on several occasions, I never had a problem with the nudists. My problem was with others who were attracted to the beach. But Farthingham missed the obvious: those people are still at the beach, whether or not the nudists are around.

These creepy people exist everywhere: at our playgrounds, in shopping malls, in our churches and in our schools. It is unfair to classify nude beaches as a pervert magnet because all you have to do is look at the Megan’s Law database to see they are everywhere in every community.

But the fact is, with fewer people on the beach, criminals are emboldened by the ability not to have witnesses. With more traffic in the parking lot there will be less opportunity for a car burglar to get the opportunity to break in. After seven years of crime and trash at Bates, it is obvious that removing the nudists did not solve the problem but made it worse.

Farthingham was wrong.

4. We Must Protect the Children

Social Nudity is Child Abuse. This should be for adults only.

Many opponents of nude beach fall back on the objection that the kids need protecting from gawkers on the beach and from their own parents.

Everyone wants the best, safest environment for their children. We don’t object to the way you are raising your kids so don’t object to mine!

We believe nudist environments, with the close supervision of parents and beach ambassadors, makes kids safer here than on any clothed beach, or at a shopping mall, or even in some churches!

In 1996 Dennis Craig Smith published a 10 year study of children raised in a nudist park environment. His evidence concluded that the children of nudist families grew up healthier, with more stable relationships, lower arrests, were healthier with fewer sexual hang-ups or drug problems that the sample of 100 clothed kids.

Copies of this study (1986 – 1996) are available upon request. An extract of four of the chapter with the study’s conclusions are included in this brief for your review (pdf format, reproduced with the permission of the author).

Summary of Findings:

The respondents resided across the continental United States. The overall mean (average) age of those raised as social nudists was 29.9 year; the overall mean age of the control (non nudist) group was 22.9 years.

1. The great majority (85.0%) of the social nudists were raised by one or both of their natural parents. 90% said nudity at home was a common practice. The respondents generally described their childhoods and adolescence as being healthy, normal, and unemotional.

2. The group raised as nudists are middle-class persons with careers started and marriages established. In this respect they appear quite similar to general population. Social pathology indicators (e.g. psychiatric care, arrest, imprisonments, etc.) did not demonstrate any unusual indices among these respondents. Only three of the social nudists (5.0%) indicated having been jailed for more than two days. Indices of psychiatric illness and treatment among these respondents were well within social norms (Segal, 1975).

3. The analyses did not tie the actual occurrence of social nudity with any negative effects, guilt, or regrets. The vast majority of social nudists (81%) labeled themselves as heterosexuals. When asked if they were regularly engaging in homosexual behavior only 3% of the social nudists said yes.

4. Interestingly, the two groups (nudists and non-nudists) differ in their opinions as to the potentially deleterious effects of parental nudity. As to the potential advantages of nudity, the social nudists group agreed significantly more than the college groups that growing up in a nude environment leads to positive rather than to negative feelings about one's body. However, the college groups failed to agree that nudists have had happier marriages while the social nudists espoused that view.

5. Finally, less than 1% of the respondents indicated any regrets or negative effects about being raised social nudists. The social nudists provide an endorsement of their upbringing by having indicated that 73.3% of them plan to raise their children as nudists.

Conclusions of Study:

A. The notion that social nudity during childhood is detrimental to the child's normative course of development is largely a cultural belief rather than a demonstrated outcome.

B. The Freudian doctrine expoused by Drs. Spock and Brothers of the harmful effects of social nudiy on a child’s psychosexual development remains theory, without empirical support from those directly affected.