Ban on saggy pants: Why do we require laws against looking foolish?

By David McElroy · October 5, 2011

With every new generation, there’s some outrage that compels mature adults to get up out of their recliners and shout the current equivalent of, “You kids get off my lawn,” at the teen-aged weirdos. The current outrage to public decency is saggy pants.

When I was a teen-ager, the issue had been longer hair for a couple of decades already. Older people didn’t seem to want to trust kids with hair over their ears, but they slowly adjusted. Eventually, it went out of style. Then came back. Again and again. Fashions are stupid and unpredictable, but they always change.

For some unknown reason, the current craze among a certain segment of youth is wearing pants in such a way that they hang way down. When I see kids dressed like that, I laugh. I laugh even harder when I notice the pretentious looks on their faces that tell me just how hard they’re trying to be cool by trying not to look as though they’re trying to be cool. (Follow that?) But some adults aren’t just laughing. These bozos are in positions of power, so they’re passing laws to do something about the irritation at having to see such idiocy. Sadly, I’m not sure which generation is ultimately acting the silliest about the matter.

I was reminded of this again today because I noticed a small city in north Alabama just passed a ban on saggy pants — which is vaguely defined as wearing pants three inches lower than the hip. For his part, the city police chief didn’t sound too excited about trying to enforce the ban. “Our guys aren’t going to be real crazy about running a ruler up and down someone’s backside, but we will do what we can,” the chief said. It’s sad when the police chief makes more sense at a small city council meeting than the people passing the laws.

The councilman who introduced the ordinance swore he had no intentions of telling people how to dress. Instead, he said, it was all about making sure that underwear doesn’t show. (I wonder how he would feel if people started wearing saggy pants with no underwear at all, but that’s another matter.)

The crazy thing is that if these people were wearing underwear on the beach, they’d fit right in. Why is it legal to show a little bit of something in one instance, but showing a lot of it in another instance is illegal? Why would a woman’s bikini be legal, but her underwear wouldn’t be? What’s the difference?

We create artificial differences in our heads — and then we expect other people to obey the arbitrary rules we set up. Personally, I’d rather not look at people’s underwear or their saggy pants or dozens of other things that people routinely wear. But if we’re going to live together in a one-size-fits-all society, we can’t allow the whims of a few to make arbitrary rules for the rest of us. In a society that insists on making rules for everyone, I have to argue that these goofy teens have the right to dress this way — if their parents are foolish enough to allow it.

Most of the people who wore ridiculously long hair years ago grew up, got haircuts and got real jobs and became responsible adults. There’s no reason to think the same thing won’t happen to most of the idiots of this generation who dress like this. Sending police officers armed with rulers to arrest them doesn’t help anyone. Some of the adults need to grow up.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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