Oct 15 2007
Stupid laws and the gradual loss of our freedom - Take 2
First it was smoking bans, seat-belt laws and a myriad of seemingly benign legislation bent on controlling society at the cost of your personal freedom. Now it is baggy pants. Yep, baggy pants. Are you serious? As if there isn’t enough going on in our world, let alone our communities, that baggy pants are an issue. All across the country these types of legislation are either in place now or in the proposal phase. The elected officials are attempting to make a positive correlation between baggy pants and crime. Here a couple of blurbs from a recent ABCnews.com article on the subject:
“If we have kids going around wearing pants below their butts, it’s not nice, not decent,” says Timothy Holmes, a city commissioner in Opa-locka, Fla.
In Atlanta, City Councilman C.T. Martin says he’s trying to raise standards and instill values in today’s youth.
“Bill Cosby started this conversation, and we let him down,” Martin says, referring to the comedian’s controversial criticism of the parenting skills, grammar and values of poor blacks.
Laws like this are extremely dangerous, I agree with Cosby, it goes back to parenting, you can’t legislate your way out of this. Just because you wear a mini-skirt, it doesn’t make you a whore, the same goes with baggy pants (the crime part that is, not your inclination to be a whore).
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Whenever I see a kid with baggy pants below his butt, as I’m about to be annoyed, I think about all of the stuff that I do that is probably annoying to others. As far as mini-skirts are concerned, I don’t get annoyed. If we outlaw all eccentric behavior, all of the interesting people will be in jail. If we must prosecute on the basis of behavior, I vote to make it illegal to be a politically correct busybody. I think 10-20 years in the slammer is an appropriate penalty.
baggy pants are ridiculous, but making a law banning them seems equally ridiculous.