This Well-Intentioned Proposal Is Doomed

A member of the Atlanta City Council is proposing a law that is doomed to failure--and that's really unfortunate. From the August 22, 2007 Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Exposed boxer shorts and thongs would be illegal in any public place in Atlanta if the City Council approves a proposed amendment to the city's indecency laws.
The target is young men who wear their pants low off their hips to show off the two pairs of boxers they wear beneath their saggy pants, said Atlanta Councilman C.T. Martin, a college recruitment consultant who sponsored the ordinance. Saggy pants are an "epidemic" that are becoming a "major concern" in cities and states around the country, the ordinance reads."Little children see it and want to adopt it, thinking it's the in thing," Martin said Wednesday. "I don't want young people thinking that half-dressing is the way to go. I want them to think about their future."
Under the proposed ordinance, women also couldn't reveal the strap of a thong beneath their pants. Nor could they wear jogging bras in public or show off even a wisp of a bra strap, said Debbie Seagraves, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia.
The proposed ordinance states that "the indecent exposure of his or her undergarments" would be unlawful in a public place. It would go in the same portion of the city code that outlaws sex in public and the exposure or fondling of genitals and the breast of a woman. Martin said the penalty would be a fine in an amount to be determined.
Seagraves said any legislation that creates a dress code would not survive a court challenge. She said there's no way the law could be enforced in a nondiscriminatory way. She said it targets a cultural phenomenon that came out of the black youth culture.
"This is a racial profiling bill that promotes and establishes a framework for an additional type of racial profiling," Seagraves said.

"Black youth culture"? No, it actually comes out of the black gang culture. (The ACLU may not recognize that there's a difference.) Lots of jails and prisons don't allow belts, both for the risk of suicide and the potential to use a belt as a weapon. Gang members and young black men who wanted to look like gang members stopped wearing belts--and intentionally wearing their pants baggy to expose their boxers--as a way of saying, "I'm a gang member--or I want you to think I'm one." Now it has become fashionable--in spite of being among the most unclassy styles that I have never seen.

I completely sympathize with Councilman Martin's concerns. My guess is that Martin wants young black men to be seen by whites as decent and respectable members of American society, and is therefore attempting to rid Atlanta of this absurd symbol of gang culture. It reminds me of bikers wearing swastikas in the 1950s and 1960s. Did they wear swastikas because they sympathized with the Nazis? No, but it was a way of saying, "I'm bad, and I spit on everything that my parents' generation did."

Unfortunately, the problem with such an ordinance isn't just that the ACLU will challenge it as "racial profiling" or violating freedom of speech. The problem is how do you define "undergarments"? Boxer shorts are not so different from shorts in appearance these days. Would someone wearing briefs, then boxer shorts, then sagging pants be in violation if the boxer shorts were visible?

For women, the definitional problem is even more severe. The camisole used to be considered an undergarment, but now many women wear them as outerwear. Spaghetti strap camisoles with a bra strap showing would certainly qualify as a violation of Martin's proposed ordinance. (Not to mention that the combination looks ridiculous.) But the camisole alone can range from profoundly provocative to really, really gross, depending on who is wearing it. Is a camisole an undergarment or not?

I don't have much hope for an ordinance like this to be enforceable. It's rather like banning the wearing of swastikas, which even ignoring freedom of speech claims, is too easy to get around. You can define a swastika, but what happens if someone wears a swastika with one arm broken off? It's no longer a swastika within the law, but everyone stills knows what it is.

Somehow or another, there needs to be a great spiritual change in black inner city America to solve this particular problem. There are a lot of serious problems that laws can fix, but I rather doubt that this is one of those problems.