In fact, there's no law in CT forbidding the exposure of titties, but perhaps there should at least be a minimum comeliness standard

Protesters to bare chests for gender equality at GoTopless Day rally in New Haven

The protest, which an organizer says will include attendees — women and men — baring their chests on the New Haven Green, is advocating for explicit legal protections for women to go topless in both New Haven and Connecticut.

Organizers claim that the lack of such protections is a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which requires that laws treat people of different races, genders and sexual orientations, among other identities, equally.

"This is a protest for gender equality, because right now men can go topless in the street, or in the park and women cannot," said Kayso Perrier, a protest organizer with GoTopless. "This is a right under the Constitution, and we are going to exercise that right, and it needs to be respected."

The Aug. 23 rally in New Haven is part of a campaign of what organizers have described as "civil rights marches" being held across New England to push for topless equality. GoTopless is marking Saturday as "National Go-Topless Day," a holiday the group founded, because of its proximity to Women's Equality Day, which is celebrated annually on Aug. 26, and is holding similar marches in Providence on Aug. 24 and Boston on Aug. 26.

There is no law in either New Haven or Connecticut preventing women from going topless in the state, and GoTopless even says the state has "top freedom in effect" on its online tracker. But Perrier argues that the law is still ambiguous, and women are at risk of being arrested for lewd behavior or disorderly conduct while topless in public, though she admitted she had not heard of that happening in the state.

Officer Christian Bruckhart, a spokesperson for the New Haven Police Department, said that being topless in public could fall under either breach of peace or disorderly conduct statutes, but that there were no laws he knew of specifically targeting the practice in the state. He said anecdotally, he could not remember an arrest made just for a woman being topless, without extenuating circumstances.

Aha! Now we’re down to the bare nub of it:

On top of the legal protest, Perrier said the gathering was also meant to change social norms, and that the group had chosen New Haven for its first Connecticut protest because of the presence of Yale University, which they hoped would include young people who might be more open minded to their ideas.

"We are changing the perception of the female body, and female breasts, because women shouldn’t be ashamed of any of it," Perrier said. "The goal is encouraging women to love themselves, whatever shape they are."

Who’s deranged enough to spend their time and energy on this sort of thing? Well, here’s a hint:

Both the organization GoTopless, and the ideology behind the movement, are also heavily intertwined with the Raelian Movement, a UFO religion founded in France in the 1970s that touts itself as the "first scientific religion," according to sociologist Susan J. Palmer.

Perrier herself is a priest in the Raelian movement, which believes that humans were created by extraterrestrials called "Elohim," and she said that many of history's great prophets  — including Jesus, Mohammed, the Buddha and Raël, a French journalist who founded GoTopless — were hybrids of human's and Elohim. 

Perrier stressed that the guiding principles of the organization were love and acceptance of all people, which is why they advocate for topless equality.

The movement, which had 65,000 members as of 2022, also requires adherents to donate 10% of their income towards building an embassy for the Elohim in Jerusalem and believes that the extraterrestrials may return to Earth and share their advanced technology with humans in 2035, according to the Religious Media Centre, an independent British media organization.