Maryland judge decides mooning just barely legal

Homeowner who exposed contempt for his neighbor acquitted in appeal

By DAVID MONTGOMERY
Washington Post

WASHINGTON - A suburban judge has 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," says lawyer James Maxwell, speaking of his client, Raymond McNealy, 44, of suburban 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 earlier this month.


'Disgusting and demeaning'

As Circuit Judge John Debelius III said in the acquittal, mooning is "disgusting" and "demeaning."
McNealy, who is retired on disability from his family's home improvement business, might 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 of Marylanders to moon has been affirmed.

But the implications are staggering.

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," opines Maxwell.

He considers his court victory a nice bit of legal reasoning: "With hard work, we cracked the case, no buts about it."

Not so fast, says Montgomery County State's Attorney Doug Gansler: "This is not a blanket permission slip to moon in Maryland."


Criminal intent

Here the lawyers fall into an arcane back-and-forth. While Maxwell says the judge ruled that buttocks are never "private parts" to fit the crime of indecent exposure, Gansler says 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.

Incidentally, Maxwell says his research suggests mooning also is legal in Washington, but not in Virginia.

"If the Georgetown basketball team is traveling out to Virginia, and somebody decides to moon somebody on the way," Maxwell says, "they better do it before they cross the river."

But it's hard to imagine that mooning the White House from Lafayette Square would be tolerated for long.

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 has always been with us, because we are not always an eloquent people, or maybe mooning is the height of eloquence.


Chaucer wrote about it

In The Canterbury Tales, written in the 14th century, Chaucer included a seminal mooning scene in The Miller's Tale.
Mooning, or references to buttocks as moons, turns up in the work of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett.

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.