EDITORIAL – Va. undies bill exposes delegates’ prejudices

Virginia wants people to pull up their pants. The Virginia House of Delegates approved a bill… Virginia wants people to pull up their pants. The Virginia House of Delegates approved a bill that would call for a $50 fine for people whose low pants expose their underwear in a “lewd or indecent manner.”

This crackdown comes because of one Norfolk legislator’s push to ban what he considers inappropriate dress — pants that either droop or are cut so low that they expose underwear.

OK, we’ll bite: What exactly constitutes wearing underwear in a lewd or indecent manner? Can visible undergarments be worn primly — for instance, with ruffles — or is all exposed underwear by definition lewd?

And what happens when people aren’t wearing underwear at all? Does going commando automatically exclude you from such a fine? Well, we guess that’ll be for the courts to decide.

At least Virginia, unlike other states, didn’t set a certain percentage of the body that must be exposed to warrant this fine.

Still, that leaves a lot up to interpretation. How much underwear needs to show to warrant a fine? Cops should issue a “pull up your pants” warning before ticketing people, or perhaps only go after repeat offenders or those who let their pants droop so far as to be a public menace, hurting unsuspecting onlookers with glimpses of sparkly thongs or plaid boxers.

Of course, we bet legislators haven’t predicted one of the bill’s unintended consequences: high rates of juvenile delinquency. As current and former teen-agers, we can safely say that underwear — and the prospect of seeing another person’s underwear — was one of our biggest motives to attend school. This bill, if passed, will eliminate many teens’ incentives to go to school. If they can’t spend fifth period staring at the slight gap between their classmates’ shirts and pants, why bother going to school at all?

Kidding aside, this bill is symptomatic of the ever-widening generation gap. It’s not that crotchety old people don’t understand the appeal of low pants and exposed drawers — it’s not too hard to figure out why young people want to look at each other’s bodies.

It’s that, as people in positions of power, the delegates have decided that their cultural values are inherently better than those of the people for whom they legislate. If this were really about underwear, then the Virginia police could just enforce the existing indecent exposure laws.

But things aren’t so simple. The same legislator who proposed the new undies rule didn’t stop at banning naughty bits. He also proposed laws banning blasting car stereos and driving while leaning back really far. All this just shows that, given a marginal bit of power, people will legislate against what irritates them, whether or not it’s in keeping with the law’s jurisdiction.

We in Pennsylvania might want to keep an eye on this law. Virginia’s only a short car ride away, and we don’t want to get slapped with a fine on the way to the beach. And we hope that Pittsburgh doesn’t take its cue from the Old Dominion State. Given Pitt’s fondness for exposed thongs and boxers, low-pants-wearing students would be stuck bailing the city out of debt. At $50 dollars a violation, our wallets would be as naked as our backsides.