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Posted - 02/17/2003 : 12:50:53 PM
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FPTribune.com
Peace activists bare all on beach By Mark Pollio staff writer February 15, 2003
PALM BEACH COUNTY -- Unarmed and unclothed, a nudist group twisted their naked bodies into a peace sign and heart on a local beach Friday.
The event, organized by Fort Pierce resident Toni Anne "T.A." Wyner, was designed to protest the potential war with Iraq and celebrate Valentine's Day. The clothes came off of two dozen people at 11 a.m. at the John D. MacArthur State Park in North Palm Beach.
The protest mirrored similar gatherings in New York and California.
"The vulnerability of the nude body is a peace sign in and of itself," said Wyner, co-founder of Sunnier Palms Nudist Park in Fort Pierce. "When nudity is combined with another form of expression, it is protected speech."
That free speech doesn't come easy. Wyner and other naturists have been at odds with state park officials and law enforcement since they started holding nude gatherings on the beach almost 20 years ago.
For years, the group has put on nude plays at the beach. The plays, written by Wyner, tell stories about what nude beaches used to be like in Florida years ago. Wyner said MacArthur, for whom the park is named, used to go skinny-dipping all the time.
Several times police arrested actors and actresses involved in the plays for violating a park rule banning nudity. Every charge brought against a nudist involved in these group performances has later been dropped, Wyner said.
"In every area of the park no individual shall expose the human, male or female genitals, pubic area, the entire buttocks or female breast below the top of the nipple, with less than a fully opaque covering," the rule states.
This year, the DEP filed for a temporary restraining order to stop the performance. Thursday, U.S. District Court Judge Donald Middlebrooks granted a preliminary injunction overturning the restraining order.
Middlebrooks also ruled the state could put up signs warning other visitors about the stripping sunbathers. The state instead put up a semi-sheer screen on three sides of the site. There were no arrests this year.
Wyner said she would continue to hold nude events at the beach. State officials said they would continue to enforce the rule.
"As long as the rule remains as it is, this will keep happening," said Kathalyn Gaither, a spokeswoman for the Department of Environmental Protection. "As far as a rule change, they would have to request one."
Marilyn Weil, who brought her three grandchildren to the beach Friday morning, said she was warned about the protest before she reached the beach.
"It's a little bizarre, but it's freedom of expression," Weil said. "I'd rather have them see that than a bunch of dead bodies on the television screen, which is what we'd see if we bomb Iraq."
-- -- -- -- -- PalmBeachPost.com - Saturday, February 15, 2003
Protesters bare all against war in Iraq By Paul Lomartire, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
NORTH PALM BEACH --Tossing aside their signs -- No Iraq War -- and then their shorts, T-shirts and bikinis, 23 protesters lay in the sand to form a peace symbol at the John D. MacArthur Beach State Park.
"Being nude is being vulnerable, and that's the message of peace," T.A. Wyner said Friday.
Wyner, a veteran Fort Pierce naturist, helped organize the Living Nude Peace Sign. On Thursday, a U.S. District court ruled that the nude protest was legal at the public beach.
Park rangers watched impassively from a couple of hundred yards away as Wyner built the peace symbol with bare bodies in the rough sand. Park emplo
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