WAIST CASE
With her hip-hugging jeans fastened low enough to show off the sparkly strings of her thong, Britney Spears could be a common criminal when she comes home to Louisiana to put on a show.
And Nelly's baggy jeans, if they happen to slip and show his drawers, could get him booted from the rap circuit to a New Orleans jail cell if state lawmakers approve a bill filed Tuesday in the House that would make it a crime to wear pants below the waist.
Even plumbers could get canned under the draft law that
state Rep. Derrick Shepherd, D-Marrero, said he filed because he was tired of catching glimpses of boxer shorts and G-strings over the low-slung belt lines of young adults.
House Bill 1626 would punish anyone caught wearing low-riding pants with a fine of as much as $500 or as many as six months in jail, or both.
"I'm sick of seeing it," said Shepherd, a first-term legislator, who added he's gotten similar complaints from ministers in his district. "The community's outraged. And if parents can't do their job, if parents can't regulate what their children wear, then there should be a law."
As proposed, the bill would be tacked onto the state's obscenity law, which restricts sexual activity in public places and the sale of sexually explicit items.
Joe Cook, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Louisiana chapter, said the bill is unlikely to pass because it probably does not meet a long-standing U.S. Supreme Court standard for the prohibition of obscene behavior under the First Amendment.
What about plumbers?
Cook offered common examples of appropriate dress that could be described as illegal under the bill, which would ban a person from "wearing his pants below his waist and thereby exposing his skin or intimate clothing."
"What about a woman who is wearing a bathing suit under her garment or she has something like a sarong wrapped around her and it's below her waist," he said. "I can think of a lot of workers, plumbers, who are working and expose their buttocks and the beginning of the crack of their anus."
Shepherd said such technicalities generally would be overlooked by police, who would only cite violators who deliberately wear pants low on their hips. His bill does not define an unlawful outfit.
"It's sort of like nudity," he said. "You know it when you see it."
Cook said, however, that the standard needs to be airtight before it's written into state law, though he added that the legislation would waste time and resources.
"As if police officers didn't have enough to do to be bothered by something like this," he said. "We got a lot of bad guys out on the street . . . and that's what the police need to be about. This is a 'solution in search of a problem' type of law."
The bill will be heard by the Administration of Criminal Justice Committee, though no hearing date has been set. State Reps. Cedric Richmond and Austin Badon, both New Orleans Democrats, have signed on as co-authors, they said.
State Rep. Danny Martiny, R-Metairie, chairman of the committee, said Wednesday that he supports Shepherd's bill in principle but added that it would have to be more narrowly tailored to target miscreants to make state law books.
"If there was a way we could work it to do that, I would not be opposed to that," he said. "I commend him for trying to do something good, but I'm not sure he's going to be able to get there."
Legislating fashion
Shepherd's bill is not local government's first effort to control a fashion trend made popular by pop music idols and movie stars.
A Westwego councilman in 2002 ditched his attempt to bar low-riding jeans from public buildings after the city attorney reported that an ordinance regulating drawers-exposing jeans would interfere with freedom of speech and would not meet federal standards.
In 2000, Orleans Parish Deputy Assessor Donald Smith called for a city ordinance against wearing pants "below the equator," as he described the practice at the time. That measure appears never to have sparked a broad public debate.
And a year earlier, state Rep. Cynthia Willard, D-New Orleans, filed a bill requiring Louisiana's 66 school boards to ban baggy pants that expose underwear or backsides. That bill, which was never heard by the House Education Committee, said the fashion "encourages youth to engage in inappropriate behavior and shows a lack of respect for others in society."
Shepherd, an attorney, said his bill aims to change the fashion sense of teenagers, who have adopted the "disrespectful, obscene and unprofessional" practice of letting their pants hang off their hips at school, at the mall and even on the basketball court.
"There's a way to shoot hoops professionally," he said. "You don't have to shoot hoops with your pants below your waist."
He admitted, however, that the bill does not target minors specifically and therefore does not directly mirror other laws that restrict teenagers' curfew and the kinds of movies they may see.
Shepherd said that like Willard's failed bill, his legislation aims to correct a fashion faux paus that has implications not only on a young person's sense of style but also on his or her sense of self.
"Hopefully, if we pull up their pants," he said, "we can lift their minds while we're at it."
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