Elk Grove Village repeals opposite sex clothing ban
Elk Grove Village's board Wednesday formally repealed a decades-old ordinance banning people from wearing clothes "properly belonging to the opposite sex."
The unanimous vote came on the consent agenda of a brief Wednesday morning meeting, which was scheduled to scrub the 1961 rule from the books and address unrelated tax increment financing issues in town.
"We were not going to enforce it, but it should be removed, and we did it," Mayor Craig Johnson said.
Local resident and attorney Jim Naughton, during a review of the village code, brought up the antiquated provision to Johnson a year ago, and again recently. The mayor said the law was to be repealed last year as a part of a massive review and rewrite of other old code language, but got delayed by the pandemic.
The Elk Grove Village repeal, and Naughton's advocacy, led the mayors of Des Plaines and Schaumburg on Tuesday to declare they're taking steps to repeal similar 1960s-era rules related to opposite sex clothing in their municipal codes.
A vote by Des Plaines aldermen is set for June 19.