Rep. Kevin Yoder (R-KS) is in hot water for a vacation he took with GOP colleagues and families in Israel last year: After a night of fun, Yoder stripped down to the bare nakedness and skinny-dipped in the holy waters of the Sea of Galilee.
“After dinner I followed some Members of Congress in a spontaneous and very brief dive into the sea and regrettably I jumped into the water without a swimsuit,” Yoder told Politico. “[For] any embarrassment I have caused for my colleagues and constituents, I apologize.”We don’t think Yoder did anything particularly wrong. Tacky, maybe—the Sea of Galilee (actually a lake) is a Christian holy site where Jesus supposedly walked on water—but nothing worthy of an FBI investigation. It was, after all, a privately funded excursion.
The American Association for Nude Recreation doesn’t think Yoder did anything wrong either: “The U.S. has a long history of political skinny dippers: President Johnson even went skinny-dipping while in office with evangelist Billy Graham,” says AANR spokeswoman Carolyn Hawkins. “Heck, prior to the mid-1800s, most everyone skinny-dipped — swimwear hadn’t been invented.
Hawkins does chide Yoder for dropping trou where it wasn’t allowed and suggests next time he trek to Tel-Baruch beach near Tel-Aviv, where nude sunbathing is the norm.
In the spirit of celebrating skinny-dipping, we thought it would be a good time to trot out GayCities’ roundup of the best nude beaches on Earth, including San Diego‘s Black Beach, Herring Cove in P-Town and Capetown’s Sandy Bay.
Click through to see GayCities’ 2012 list of the world’s 10 best nude beaches.
