In Salt Lake City, Utah, you cannot hunt whales (even though the city is in the middle of a desert). The law of Iowa regulates the duration of a kiss — it must not exceed five minutes, and in Los Angeles, husbands are forbidden to beat their wives... with a belt whose width exceeds two inches, without the consent of the "fair half." And now the legislators of the town of Delcambre, Louisiana, apparently decided not to lag behind their colleagues and leave their mark on the tablets of legal history.
The burgomaster from the film "That Same Münchhausen," as I recall, was outraged that some "allow themselves to sew on patch pockets and taper sleeves." The authorities of Delcambre declared war on low-hanging trousers, from under which underwear is visible. Following this fashion, common among young hip-hop fans, can land you in jail for six months, or at best, get off with a fine of $500.
The mayor of the town, Carol Broussard, hippied out in the 1960s, but she has no leniency toward the current immoral, indecent, and "gangster" style. "I don't think our fashion was more terrible than their sagging pants," the mayor said her weighty word. In the larger city of Mansfield, also in Louisiana, they treated underwear sticking out from under jeans more tolerantly: there, a fashion-following rapper can be fined only $150, or subjected to a measure familiar to our domestic hipsters, idlers, and hooligans — arrest for 15 days.
The harsh fight against sagging pants, apparently, is dictated by the fact that in the conservative South, any wearer of such pants (usually young black men) is seen as a potential criminal. Law enforcers are not even embarrassed by the fact that in jeans dangling at the "below the waist" level, it is very problematic to "go on a job" or run away from the police.
Actually, in prisons, where this style originated, uniforms were issued large and without belts precisely so that a prisoner could not run far, hang himself with a belt, or strangle a cellmate with it. Gangsta rappers made the prison attribute an element of their outfit, and thanks to music television, this not very elegant manner became fashionable and glamorous, and not only among African Americans.
Now the campaign is spreading throughout Louisiana, and it is quite possible that soon a "law on protruding underwear" will be passed at the state level. Earlier, an attempt to ban the wearing of sagging jeans was made in Virginia. Such zeal of provincial legislators has already shifted the conflict from the haberdashery plane to the political one. The American Civil Liberties Union saw a racist undertone in the fight against improper pants and the hip-hop style in general. "I don't understand how you can talk about a legislative ban?! It's only about the desire to stand out and follow a style that came out of the subculture of black youth," said Debbie Seagraves, executive director of the branch of this human rights organization in another southern state, Georgia.