La. city wastes tax dollars on baggy pants legislation

I recently read an article in the BBC news about baggy pants.

Well, it wasn’t about baggy… I recently read an article in the BBC news about baggy pants.

Well, it wasn’t about baggy pants themselves, but about how a small town in Louisiana wants to ban them. Mayor Carol Broussard of Delcambre, La., wants to make pants that show your underwear illegal and make people who wear them pay up to $500 or face six months in jail. “It’s gotten way out of hand out here,” Broussard said in an Associated Press article.

My first thought was to agree with Broussard. When I walk around my town or around Pitt’s campus, it’s not hard to spot at least a few people wearing trousers well below their waist with their underwear plainly exposed. Frankly, that’s not something I really want to see, so at first Broussard’s idea seemed like a good one to me. I mean, pants were made to cover up certain areas of the human body, so why wear them if you’re not using them properly? As Broussard himself said, “They’re better off taking the pants off and just wearing a dress.”

However, there’s really more to the issue than that. First off, the Delcambre city council has decided that seeing people’s underpants is an act of “public lewdness.” But that leaves a bit of a hole in their logic, because if it’s indecent to see the top half of someone’s underwear, why isn’t it indecent to see the straps of a girl’s bra under her tank top, or a shirtless guy running through the streets?

To make sure the law actually is about lewdness and not just about a certain style of dress, the city council needs to make sure that it’s being fair in what kind of “lewdness” it’s targeting. After all, the pants themselves aren’t really hurting anyone, according to the logic of the council. Instead, it’s what you can see because the pants are so low, and if it’s so indecent to see a man’s underpants, why isn’t it indecent to see anyone else’s? Second, I’m not so sure it’s really that lewd to show the top of your underwear in the first place. I mean, I personally think it’s a strange and kind of stupid fashion choice, but I’ve never actually been offended by it. Puzzled, absolutely, but not offended. To me, this potential law seems more like a bunch of crotchety old people complaining about “them young ‘uns with their saggy trousers” and waving their walkers grumpily. Albert Roy, the councilman who introduced the measure, said that “anyone can see your parts when you wear sagging pants.” But by that logic, can’t you also see someone’s parts when they wear, for example, a halter top? Or a swimsuit? Or (God forbid) bike shorts?

Unless there’s actually some measure of indecency to the activity, I would think that it’s pretty hard to justify it as indecent exposure. According to this logic, we should ban tight clothes and low-cut tops because we can use our imaginations to “see your parts,” as it were. And of course it’s indecent to force someone to use his imagination to see something, right?

And really, is this the best thing that Delcambre has to worry about? Baggy pants? I mean, come on. Wasting taxpayer money to deliberate on underpants seems a little, I don’t know, stupid.

According to an article written for the city council in 2006, Mary Tutwiler said that the Delcambre city council has been fighting with the federal and state government in order to enact housing elevation laws after Hurricane Rita. Perhaps they should worry about that, rather than