By Earl Rinehart, The Columbus Dispatch
COLUMBUS – Topless women at ComFest will not stop the flow of beer, wine and liquor at the popular festival, the state agreed in federal court on Tuesday.
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The festival that fills Goodale Park one weekend every summer won a temporary restraining order against the Ohio Department of Public Safety and the Ohio Division of Liquor Control, which complained that the festival broke “Rule 52,” which bans “the showing of the female breast with less than a fully opaque covering of any part of the nipple and/or areola.”
Tuesday’s order means there will be beer, wine and liquor at the festival. And topless women if they so choose, but that’s not a planned event.
At last year’s festival, an agent with Public Safety’s Ohio Investigative Unit cited festival organizers because volunteers did nothing to prohibit topless women where alcohol is served.
“No one admitted giving the order” to cite the festival, said Ed Hastie, an attorney representing ComFest.
Assistant Attorney General Charles Febus declined to comment after Tuesday’s hearing before U.S. District Judge Michael H. Watson.
In its request for the temporary restraining order, ComFest officials invoked the protection of the First and Fourteenth Amendments, saying the festival “implements its commitment to alternative lifestyles, equal right and individual freedoms” and rejects as sexist “stereotypical views of proper female attire and patriarchal notions of ownership over females’ bodies.”
The issue of nudity came last week when state agents met with festival organizers, as they do every year, Hastie said. Volunteers were told that agents would shut down beer, wine and liquor sales if ComFest workers didn’t force topless women to cover up or leave.