Town shouldn't crack down on recreation area
Copyright © 2003 Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc.
Some folks in Albion have got a bee in their bonnets over Tony and Claudia Takacs' new business venture, Yorktown Recreation. It seems visitors to the campground/resort tend —gasp! — to take their clothes off once they get there.
Clothing-optional recreation areas may be rare in the United States, but Yorktown Recreation is not without precedent. The American Association for Nude Recreation includes 253 affiliated clubs, resorts, bed and breakfast businesses and RV camps in the country, although none — prior to the Takacs' —are in Maine.
The Takacs' place will feature a recreation building complete with heated swimming pool, sauna, hot tub, baths and space for meetings and other activities. They plan to build several cabins for visitors who would prefer not to tent. To get there, campers will travel down a remote, dirt road past 400 acres of land the Takacs use for their dairy farm.
So why are some two dozen or so neighbors complaining?
According to Albion Town Clerk Amanda Dow, "there were some concerns, raised by people who live near (the resort) or who live on the road leading to the resort, about the type of people this is attracting. It is just a situation where people are afraid of one bad apple coming through town."
One resident, who lives on the dirt road leading to Yorktown Recreation, has even drafted a petition in opposition to the resort. "I feel it is going to bring down the property values of my house," Barbara Kimball told a reporter. "If I had known about a clothing-optional facility going in there, I would not have bought my house, and I don't really feel safe walking or riding my bike there."
Sadly, the unspoken assumption that underlies these concerns is that nudists — or anyone who objects to our society's preoccupation with clothes —may be sexual deviants. But as Tony Takacs says, nudism has nothing to do with sexuality.
"We are not selling sex," he says. "We are not promoting sex. We aren't doing anything with sex."
When you get right down to it, nudity's "obscenity" rests in the eye of the beholder. Many people don't find the human form, in all of its glorious and inglorious varieties, offensive or obscene —and in many instances, it isn't even particularly titillating.
Granting, however, that some people do object to nudity, where better to allow people to go without clothes than a remote farm in Albion? It's one thing if a town wants to prohibit nudity from municipal parks, malls, beaches or places where the public can't avoid it, but it is a huge encroachment on a citizen's right to privacy to ban nudity in a remote campground. As long as campers exercise that right within the resort, the town has no compelling reason to force them to dress.
As for property values, one can be sympathetic with neighbors like Kimball, and yet recognize that in the United States, every homeowner is vulnerable to such surprises — especially in communities with weak or nonexistent zoning laws.
Most property owners in Albion ought to be happy that there's a new business in town — one that can help pay the bills without placing too great a demand on town services.