News

By Hilary White

LONDON, August 26, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Nudists in the UK are petitioning the government's Equalities Office to be included as an officially recognised minority group to be protected from “discrimination” in law. Called “naturists” in Britain, they have received a positive hearing from Harriet Harman, the Labour government's Equalities minister.

The lobby group British Naturism has sent a brief to the Government Equalities Office in which they claimed that nudists are unfairly discriminated against in British society. The group, whose stated purpose is to “make social nudity more acceptable across the UK,” told Harriet Harmon that a school headmaster had been suspended from her job when school board members discovered she liked to go nude in public. They complain that naturists are obliged to keep their interests “in the closet” and that naturist teachers and those in health service risk being “bullied” or laughed at if their proclivities are discovered.

Naturists, they said, “meet with significant discrimination due to prejudice against their lifestyle and beliefs.”

“We have encountered serious difficulties in dealing with both councils and swimming pool management companies. It is near impossible to persuade them to run naturist swimming sessions.” They also complain of increased fees for their events, censorship in attempts to advertise naturist events, and the refusal of services, such as FedEx deliveries, to naturist centres.

In their brief to the government, British Naturism wrote that they want the law clarified in order to guarantee uniform enforcement. Currently they say that the legality of naturism is “largely determined by the whim of individual police officers”.

The Equalities Office appears to be taking the complaints seriously and ranking it equivalent to the claims of homosexualist activists. The British Naturism brief was displayed on the website together with that of Stonewall, the homosexualist lobby group, Age Concern and the Runnymede Trust, an anti-racism campaign group.

British Naturism has 16,000 members but claims there could be as many as 1.2 million “naturists” in the country.

In related news, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has demanded that the national census includes questions on “sexual orientation.” The EHRC, that describes Stonwall as a “key partner” in its development, said in a new business plan that it would continue to “lobby for a question on sexual orientation to be included in the 2011 census,” despite opposition from the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

The ONS said in March 2006: “The ONS view remains that such questions are not suitable for the 2011 Census.

“ONS has significant concerns surrounding the issues of privacy, acceptability, accuracy, conceptual definitions and the effect that such a question could have on the overall response to the Census.”

The last census found that 0.2 per cent of households are headed by a same-sex partners. One per cent of the UK population described themselves as homosexual. Homosexual lobbyists, however, insist the number is closer to 6 per cent.

In 1987 the British Social Attitudes Survey found that three quarters of people in Britain thought that homosexuality was always, or mostly, wrong. By 2008, that figure had fallen to 32 per cent. A poll commissioned by Stonewall in 2007 found that almost nine out of ten Britons supported laws to protect homosexuals from “workplace discrimination.” 73 per cent said they would not mind if a child's teacher was homosexual and 88 per cent would not mind if a member of the royal family were homosexual.