Ocean City, Maryland is a blue-collar resort town featuring a thin strip of beach sandwiched between the Atlantic Ocean and dozens of condo high-rises, which themselves back up to the traffic-snarled Coastal Highway.  It's not the type of place Maryland's liberal elite favor, unless it's a necessary photo-op or a convention.  But for your average Joe from Maryland or elsewhere on the mid-Atlantic, it offers an affordable family vacation, and some folks just like the honky-tonk atmosphere.  I know I did in my younger days. 

A chief beach attraction for most guys is lots of almost naked women – almost meaning flimsy tops and bottoms at Ocean City.  Seems that has not been the case recently, with some ladies going topless.  You won't get an argument from me, but families with small children demurred and lodged complaints with the city.  The city sought to enforce its pre-existing ban on topless women and predictably was quickly challenged by women who wished just to let things hang.  The city sought the opinion of the Maryland state's attorney's office before continuing to enforce the ban. 

Enter Brian Frosh, the state's attorney.  Frosh is a rather odious, self-righteous liberal fellow, who in 2013 as a state legislator largely drafted and shepherded through Maryland's draconian gun ban, of which he is extremely proud, and which he continues to waste the state's money defending from constitutional challenges.  He is also wasting the state's money in a similarly vainglorious lawsuit against President Trump for supposedly violating the emoluments clause in the Constitution.  What has Maryland to gain from either pursuit?  Nothing.

But he's not averse to lying about it anyway.  About a year after the gun ban passed, when Frosh was running for his current position, I heard him give a speech in which he claimed that the gun ban had already saved thousands of lives.  It's now 2017, and there is not a shred of evidence that the ban has saved a single life, much less thousands, but what do facts matter when your main objective is sowing hysteria and fear for your own political benefit?

Anyway, Frosh and his liberal cohort in Maryland's utterly Democrat-dominated government can be found on the far left side of almost any social issue, including those related to gender relations.  Maryland passed a transgender rights law back in 2014 and has forcefully opposed efforts to restrict application of transgender "rights" to school and public facilities by the Trump administration.  Maryland also recently passed an enhanced equal pay for equal work law, expanding the law for gender identity, applying it to all employers, and affording almost countless grounds for women to litigate over pay and performance issues.

So it would seem pretty much a no-brainer for Frosh to come down on the side of women who want to go topless.  After all, as they claim, how is it fair under Maryland's anti-discrimination laws to require some Marylanders with a little extra breast tissue to wear tops while those with less tissue (sometimes) do not?

But Frosh is a typical liberal, which is to say hypocrisy is his stock in trade.  Ocean City is a valuable source of taxable income for the state, and Maryland taxes its residents about as much as any state in the union.  If city officials say that cash cow is at risk – which, after all, pays Frosh's salary and God knows how many other lawyers to pursue his futile lawsuit against Trump – how can Frosh deny them?  He might need that support should he run for governor, and for that he'll risk the topless woman vote.

Somehow Frosh's office found that women have different bodies from men's and backed Ocean City in enforcing the topless ban.  But wait: how is that even possible, given that according to Maryland's transgender law, being a woman or a man is not a matter of what kind of body you have, extra breast tissue or not, but your gender identity?

It is pretty clear now that under Maryland law, a woman who wants to go topless can still do so.  She just must insist to the Beach Patrol that she is a man.