DENVER -- The American Civil Liberties Union plans to lobby for changes to Colorado laws that require nude offenders to register as sex offenders, claiming the laws are unusually harsh.

"We are very concerned about the way in which the Colorado sex-offender registry is set up, resulting in sex-offender status for these kinds of activities," Judd Golden, who chairs the Boulder County chapter of the ACLU, told the Boulder Daily Camera.

The ACLU will host a public forum Tuesday called "Naked in Boulder." The forum will discuss whether nude offenders should be treated as "pranksters and protesters, or criminals and sex offenders."

Boulder is no stranger to naked mayhem. Last year, more than 60 nude cyclists rode around the city protesting oil-burning cars; a teenager streaked at the Boulder-Fairview football game; and about a 100 people participated in the annual Naked Pumpkin Run.

In each case, the offender could be charged with indecent exposure, which carries a mandatory registration as a sex offender.

"We're dealing with a square peg in a round hole," Stan Garnett, who became Boulder County's district attorney shortly after the pumpkin running incident, told the Camera. "Most people would say people running down the mall with pumpkins on their heads may not be somebody who is at risk of becoming a sex offender in the future."

"Prosecutors end up charging people with offenses that don't really fit in order to avoid some of these absurd consequences," said Rep. Claire Levy, a Democrat representing Boulder in the Colorado general assembly. "Then there's an offense on the record that doesn't fit the crime and the public truly doesn't know what a criminal record means."