Story LinkRuling affirms right to share feelings through mooningMaryland judge: Man's exposure isn't indecentBY DAVID MONTGOMERYThe Washington PostJanuary 7, 2006WASHINGTON -- This week, a suburban judge ruled that mooning is a cheeky yet legitimate form of communication -- but then, Chaucer and Mel Gibson taught us that long ago.The truth is that words frequently fail the human species. If you want to send a message, don't call Western Union; an even older, surer technology might serve. Unbuckle, bend, let it shine.What's the message?"He was showing his disapproval. ... It was intended to offend, in the sense of being critical," said attorney James Maxwell, speaking of his client, Raymond McNealy, 44, of Germantown, Md.Last June, exasperated by a feud involving a homeowners association, McNealy felt moved to moon his neighbor Nanette Vonfeldt, a member of the association's board, who was accompanied by her 8-year-old daughter. McNealy was put on trial for indecent exposure and found guilty last fall. His misbegotten moon could have cost him three years in prison and a $1,000 fine. After an automatic appeal, the verdict was reversed.Mooning is a blunt instrument to communicate just the sort of disapproval/contempt/ derision that homeowners associations can elicit. It is not particularly nice or well-mannered.As Circuit Court Judge John Debelius III said in the acquittal, the act is "disgusting" and "demeaning." McNealy may have experienced a different judicial outcome, added the judge, if he had been on trial for "being a jerk."At a time when some say civil liberties are being restricted (the Patriot Act is silent on mooning), it may be comforting that the right to moon has been affirmed. But the implications are staggering.When the masses come to petition the legislature for their favorite causes, will they dispense with the formalities and just drop their pants? Can citizens moon judges, police officers, the governor?"I don't think that mooning the governor -- I'm not suggesting it's a nice thing to do -- would be any worse in terms of violation of criminal law than thumbing your nose," Maxwell said.He considered his court victory a nice bit of legal reasoning: "With hard work, we cracked the case, no buts about it."Not so fast, said Montgomery County State's Attorney Doug Gansler: "This is not a blanket permission slip to moon in Maryland."Here the lawyers fall into an arcane back-and-forth. While Maxwell said the judge ruled that buttocks are never "private parts" to fit the crime of indecent exposure, Gansler said he'd prosecute again if an alleged mooner intended his act as a crime.But who moons with criminal intent?"If exposure of half of the buttock constituted indecent exposure, any woman wearing a thong at the beach at Ocean City would be guilty," Debelius said.Let the lawyers haggle. Somehow, the judge's verdict recognizes a more fundamental truth. Despite scattered prosecutions across the country, the instinct to moon is powerful and persistent. It always has been with us, because we are not always an eloquent people, or maybe mooning is the height of eloquence.In "The Canterbury Tales," written in the 14th century, Chaucer included a seminal mooning scene in "The Miller's Tale." A suitor comes looking for a kiss, and the object of his desire sticks her "nether eye" out the window, which in the dark he busses.We laugh, and in our laughter is a judgment of this boorish behavior, as intended by Chaucer, said Michael Olmert, professor of English at the University of Maryland.Mooning, or references to buttocks as moons, turns up in the work of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. The Oxford English Dictionary traces mooning as an organized activity to California in the early 1960s, and offers published examples such as: "The crew of a hovering American helicopter removed their trousers and mooned at the Russians."There are subsets of mooning activity. Photocopying a moon was popular a few years back -- in 2003 a man was arrested for doing just that at a courthouse photocopier. Pushing a moon against the window of a car or bus is a "pressed ham." Coming soon if not here already: moon pictures on cell phones.There's mooning in the movies, from "American Graffiti" to "Braveheart," in which Mel Gibson has the brave Scotsmen show what they really think of their English adversaries in a mass battlefield mooning.Mooning can be a ceremonial, community ritual. For the last quarter-century, there has been a day of the "Annual Mooning of Amtrak," across the street from a bar in Orange County, Calif. Hundreds of people gather along a chain-link fence to moon because it's wacky and fun.Mooning, as it happens, has a history in official Maryland. Late one night in 1988, Joseph Lutz, a Democratic member of the General Assembly from Harford County, was walking past a restaurant when through the window he spied a table of reporters in the otherwise empty establishment.He couldn't resist."It was not a full shot," he said later.Still: message received.
