Thanks, Ronald!  The patch fixes the problem for me.
(I directly patched the locale.py file installed from
the Python dmg, since I still haven't figured out how
to build a python executable that exhibits this
problem.)

The patch doesn't look quite right, though: in the else clause,
it looks as though you're testing 'result' before it exists.
Shouldn't the 'result = nl_langinfo(CODESET)' line come
before the 'if not result and ....' line?

On the subject of Terminal and LANG, LC_CTYPE settings, I found an 
interesting link:

http://pastie.textmate.org/111807

Indeed, after setting my region to 'South Africa' in Preferences -> 
International -> Formats, a newly opened Terminal window gives me:

newton:~ dickinsm$ locale
LANG=
LC_COLLATE="C"
LC_CTYPE="UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="C"
LC_MONETARY="C"
LC_NUMERIC="C"
LC_TIME="C"
LC_ALL=

And then python3 crashes on startup as above.  This is on a newborn (3-
week old) MacBook Pro that's been barely changed from default settings 
(and no transfer of files and settings from an old Mac, either).