Pants Hang Low

It will cost you if you get caught with your pants down in one South Carolina county.

The Jasper County council passed an ordinance Monday prohibiting sagging pants in public. It prohibits anyone from wearing pants more than three inches below the hips exposing skin or underwear.

The Beaufort Gazette reports the ordinance carries fines of between $25 and $500. The vote was 2-1 in favor with two council members absent.

Council member Gladys Jones voted against it. She says while sagging pants indicate a person has a negative self-image, the government has no business telling parents how their children should dress.

But Council Chairman George Hood says the ordinance is a way for adults to set a positive example for children. Continue reading the article on WISTV.com…

Jasper County, South Carolina, is soon to be the latest to enact an unconstitutional ordinance protecting us all from the danger of sagging pants.

Jasper County Councilman LeRoy Blackshear proposed the ordinance in June. It would ban anyone from appearing in public “wearing his or her pants more than three (3) inches below his or her hips and thereby exposing his or her skin or intimate clothing.”

Some councilmen expressed concerns about whether government should be in the business of enforcing dress codes. Blackshear, however, believes it is in our best interests:

“Some people are saying that government doesn’t have any place to tell people how to dress if they’re not buying their clothes. But government makes other laws about seat belts, open-container laws and DUI. All these are for benefit of our citizens,” he said.

What is wrong with this picture? Let’s begin with asking who does this law affect? 9 out of 10 persons wearing sagging pants are black youth. It is a current style, fad, or whatever you want to call it, and any law such as this is going to have a disproportionate impact on black persons. Not that most criminal laws are not already disproportionately enforced against minorities, but this law is actually aimed at black youth. Secondly, the law is unconstitutional on its face. Under our State Constitution, local municipalities cannot criminalize conduct that is not already criminal under state law. Continue reading the article on the South Carolina Criminal Defense Blog…

MeShorn Daniels and Peter Hayes want kids in Louisville — and the rest of the country — to pull up their pants.

Arguing that the sagging-pants fashion trend promotes an unhealthful lifestyle of gangs, crime and violence, they’ve launched the Pull Up Your Pants education campaign, designed to persuade young people to abandon the look — especially pants often worn so low that their underwear, or more, is exposed.

They already have the support of one Louisville Metro Council member, who plans to introduce a resolution in support of their campaign next month.

While the sagging-pants look has been popularized in the rap culture, Councilwoman Judy Green, D-1st District, said the trend has a history in slavery, when masters wouldn’t allow males to wear belts as a way to degrade them.

She said it’s also common in prison populations because prisoners are not allowed to wear belts, which can be used as weapons.

“It’s degrading. In some ways it’s indecent,” Green said. “It dates all the way back to slavery, but our children don’t know the history.”

And today “that type of dress is associated with gangsters and criminal activity,” said Daniels, an assistant block-watch captain for his 40th Street neighborhood in western Louisville. Continue reading the article at Courier-Journal.com…

William Tweedle, a residence hall director at Morehouse College, wants students at the historically black men’s school to get “In the Zone.”

That’s the zone where there’s no cursing, no saggin’ pants, and no use of the word whose plural spelled backward is “saggin.’ All are beneath the image of the Morehouse man, Tweedle said.

Morehouse President Robert Franklin is making the same points to students on a somewhat different plane. He talks about the new “Renaissance man” who is “well-read, well-traveled, well-spoken, well-dressed and well-balanced.”

Franklin, who was named president last year, instituted the practice of giving every freshman a tie and a blazer in the college’s primary color, maroon, as a tangible symbol of the image of a gentleman.

Morehouse is one of several historically black colleges taking action recently to improve dress on campus. Overt dissent on the Morehouse campus has been minimal, but a smattering of bloggers nationally have suggested that schools might be trying to take away students’ freedom of expression.

“Call me crazy, but I didn’t realize that there was a correlation between morality and Brooks Brothers,” Morehouse alumnus Jonathan Walton, an assistant professor of religious studies at the University of California, Riverside, wrote in an article on the subject. Continue reading the article from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution…