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Letter to the editor

Legislators' dirty laundry

By ROBERT FRIEDMAN
Published May 8, 2005

As our Tallahassee honorables stagger home from yet another grueling two-month Bacchanalia of public service, some pessimists look at what they have done and ask: "Why?"

I, on the other hand, prefer to look at what our lawmakers managed to avoid doing and ask: "Wha?"

For example, our legislators, unlike their counterparts in the Texas House, avoided passing a bill banning "sexually suggestive" dance performances by school cheerleaders and drill teams.

Democratic Texas House member Joe Deshotel said the law is needed because some of the dance routines he has seen "are just downright vulgar, something you would see at an adult club or something." Deshotel presumably knows whereof he speaks.

"It's just too sexually oriented, you know, the way they're shaking their behinds and going on, breaking it down," said bill sponsor Rep. Al Edwards, D-Houston. "And that's when they get the most cheering from all the young people in the stands."

Edwards said he had personally witnessed inappropriate dancing by cheerleaders and "majorettes" at high school football games and decided it "needs to be dealt with." At least Edwards, who in 1989 proposed legislation that would have allowed Texas authorities to amputate the fingers of drug dealers, did not suggest that the state should deal with dirty dancers by removing a few of their body parts.

Republican Rep. Tommy Merritt took the debate to a loftier plane by putting the legislation in a historical perspective. "I think we should look at going back to the old traditions, to the art of dance," Merritt told his colleagues. "It doesn't have to be all bumpin' and grindin' "

Karen Halterman, vice president for marketing at the National Cheerleaders Association, defended her organization. She told the New York Times: "We believe it's a very small minority of cheerleaders, not the 98 percent who do things right, that are being noticed at the suggestive level. "We've already been looking into this thing, since our focus has been not just on technical skills but on grooming tomorrow's leaders."

The NCA already has adopted rules that penalize squads that use "vulgar" movements such as "hip thrusting, inappropriate touching/slapping/positioning to one another."

In contrast, the Texas legislation doesn't define what is sexually suggestive, but Edwards says, "We know it when we see it."

Speaking of inappropriate positioning, our Legislature also avoided following the lead of Virginia's House of Delegates, which earlier this year approved a bill that would have imposed a $50 fine on males and females who intentionally wear their pants below the waistline, exposing underwear "intended to cover a person's intimate parts in a lewd or indecent manner."

The legislation died in the Senate, probably because of intense last-minute pressure from Virginia's powerful refrigerator-repairman lobby, but not before its sponsor, Algie Howell, D-Norfolk, made a final appeal based on logic rather than emotion:

"That's why they're called undergarments," Howell said. "They're supposed to be worn under something else."

Howell did not express an opinion on the subject of overalls.

In fact, Howell said he introduced the legislation not out of any personal interest but only "in direct response to a number of my constituents who found this to be a very important issue." He said many customers at his barber shop had expressed particular concern over the exposed-underwear fad.

Naturally, Virginia's droopy-pants debate was not complete without a gratuitous reference to the Sunshine State.

"If people in Florida can wear bikinis, a little underwear showing isn't going to hurt anybody," said 17-year-old Elvyn Shaw, one of a group of high school government students who attended the standing-room-only House hearing on the issue.

Young Elvyn apparently was unaware of some Florida communities' past efforts to ban bikinis, or at least T-backs and thongs. For example, Clearwater city commissioners, responding to a scourge of T-backed hot dog vendors, crafted an ordinance in 1994 that required clothes to cover "at least the anal cleft, the genital or pubic area and the portion of the female breast directly or laterally below the point immediately above the top of the aureola." A few years later, Pasco County sought to outlaw clothing that exposed the "cleavage of the nates of the human buttocks."

Enforcing such ordinances would require, among other things, a dictionary and a protractor. So we should all congratulate our legislators, who usually can't resist the temptation to butt into every other aspect of our lives, for steering clear of such business this year. We'll wait until another Sunday to look at some of the damage they did do.

Robert Friedman is editor of Perspective. He can be reached at friedman@sptimes.com

[Last modified May 8, 2005, 00:46:16]