By Fred Foldvary
The city council of the Mexican city of Villahermosa, which means 'beautiful villa,' has passed a law prohibiting people from being naked inside their houses if they might be viewed from the outside. A councilwoman and member of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party stated, "We are talking about zero tolerance ... for a lack of morality.'
Villahermosa, capital of the state of Tabasco, is near the Gulf of Mexico, and is near the famous Mayan ruins of Palenque. Tabasco, which is also a hot sauce, is said to derive from a Mayan Indian word meaning a place which is hot and humid. Indeed that is the climate in Tabasco, and if a resident of Villahermosa is not rich and has no air conditioner, she might be tempted, perhaps by Satan, to wear as little as possible, and her immorally weak husband may follow her evil example, just like what happened in the Garden of Eden, although, strangely enough, Adam and Eve were first naked and then tempted to wear clothing.
After the glorious Mayan civilization and the enlightenment brought about by the establishment of Christianity by the Spanish conquest, why is it only now, so many centuries later, that the revolutionary citizens of Villahermosa are banning indoor nudity? Why, oh why, have the residents of Mexico been tolerating such decadent immorality all this time?!
To understand this issue, let's go deeper and see why household nudity is such an evil. Most Mexicans believe in God, and that God created the human body in his image, as is written in Genesis. Would almighty God create an evil pornographic image? God forbid, no! Therefore, the logical conclusion is that the evil parts of the body were created by the devil, Satan, after the initial body was created by God. That's why it is evil to view at those parts.
Zero tolerance for a lack of morality is a great idea, worthy of being institutionalized by a revolutionary movement as is the Partido Revolucionario Institucional of Mexico. Villahermosa may well now become the vanguard of a new Mexican revolution, the prohibition of nakedness inside people's houses. Other Mexican cities will follow, and the American Family Association, which has been promoting a model anti-nudity ordinance, adopted by many US cities, will be proud that Mexicans are now finally conforming to American moral standards.
Immorality is evil and of course should be prohibited and punished with zero tolerance. After all, let one weed live, and they take over the yard. But how will the law banning house nudity be zero-tolerance enforced? There could be an army of volunteers armed with cell phones that patrol neighborhoods and, when they see a person walking naked by a window, immediately report it to the police, who will send an office to arrest the culprit.
Whoops, but the zero-tolerance vigilantes of Villahermosa will be committing evil by deliberately seeking out and looking at the naked bodies passing by windows! Yet that is what is required by zero tolerance. Well, I have a better idea. We now have the technology to attach tiny cameras on large insects, such as horse flies. The government of Villahermosa can breed horseflies, attach cameras to them, and have them fly all over the city. They will enter houses and then images can be beamed to computers at city hall, where software detects the presence of naked bodies, and then the police would be alerted and, with zero tolerance, jail and fine the offenders. The residents of Villahermosa will have to wear bathing suits when they shower or take a bath, because if nakedness is evil, it should be banned even if nobody is looking! This will be costly, and eliminate all privacy, but no price is too high to preserve decency!
There is, however, a little problem with this application of zero tolerance. If anything that is offensive is immoral and banned, then there can be no free expression, no freedom of religion, and no liberty at all. This denial of liberty is itself immoral. It is immoral to restrict someone's liberty just because it offends others, if it is not invading their property. A zero tolerance for lack of morality requires that there be no law prohibiting merely offensive acts which are immoral only because of one's particular religious or cultural beliefs. There is a clash of moral standards - the universal standard of liberty and natural rights, and the particular cultural standards of individuals - which shall be the moral basis for zero tolerance?
Also, if there truly be zero tolerance for lack of morality, that has to be applied to all morality, including theft and all violations of natural rights. There should be no more tolerance for any corruption, including those police who stop gringo drivers and ask for bribe money to avoid a citation. All banditos have to be captured and swiftly brought to justice.
And what about the Mexican government's theft of the wages of labor, the creation of poverty by restrictive government policies? What about the government's oil monopoly - where is the oil revenue going? What about the government's great crime of failing to allocate to Mexicans equal benefits from the land, as promised by the revolutionaries a hundred years ago?
Where is the zero tolerance for the lack of land and liberty in Mexico? Bravo to Mexicans who truly seek zero tolerance for a lack of morality, because they have a huge task ahead of them. And that's the naked truth.
This article first appeared in the Progress Report, www.progress.org.
Dr. Fred Foldvary teaches economics at Santa Clara University and is the author of several books: The Soul of Liberty, Public Goods and Private Communities, and the Dictionary of Free-Market Economics.