What else is the law but a metaphorical belt designed to uphold propriety and keep us from exposing our inherent baseness to each other? This is what an epidemic of legislative tailors seem to believe: Each month brings news of the latest effort to crack down on saggy pants.

In December, the Jasper County Council in South Carolina passed an ordinance making it illegal to wear your britches three inches below your hips and expose your underwear – or worse – to innocent bystanders. In January, South Carolina State Senator Robert Ford introduced a bill that would make saggy pants a crime throughout the entire state. Earlier this month, Joe Towns Jr., a state representative from Tennessee, took up the call against the surprisingly long-lived fashion crime, which started in the early 1990s and continues to be popular despite – or perhaps because of – repeated efforts to criminalize it.

SAGGY PANTS ARE CONSIDERED AN HOMAGE TO PRISON GARB.

Sag-bashers object on more than aesthetic grounds. A hallmark of hip-hop culture, saggy pants are considered an homage to prison garb, where belts aren’t allowed because of potential utility as a noose or weapon. To wear saggy pants is to reject authority, embrace criminality and visually assault the world with the garish patterns of fashion boxers. Critics say they also make it easy to conceal knives and guns within their droopy, voluminous folds.

The ascension of President Obama may be one reason for the surge of anti-sagging evangelism. “You know, some people might not want to see your underwear – I’m one of them,” he said during a November 2008 MTV interview. But while Obama made it clear he wasn’t interested in criminalizing the style, calling laws against pants-sagging a “a waste of time,” Ford presented his anti-sagging legislation as a tribute to the new president. “You’ve got an African-American president,” he said. “You don’t have to emulate prisoners no more. You can emulate somebody like Barack Obama.”

Ford doesn’t believe his bill will pass – he “just wants a spirited discussion” on the taxpayer’s dime.

Even if enforcement is rare, however, the number of places in America where, say, Britney Spears and Paris Hilton might end up with lifetime sentences just for walking down the street is alarming. Many municipalities now have ordinances that make it illegal to expose anything more than a three-inch swath of underwear. Zero-tolerance vigilantes seem more inclined to follow the strong-arm tactics of the Queer Eye for the Straight Guy-style bullies than our Founding Fathers when it comes to making over their fellow citizens.

As the number of elected officials willing to moon the Bill of Rights increases, one can’t help but wonder if their efforts are terribly misguided. If saggy pants are such a sure indicator of criminality, why do we want to eliminate this easy identification system? Perhaps we should even pass laws that require ex-cons and other suspicious types to wear saggy pants – if you’re going to get mugged by someone, wouldn’t you rather it be by a guy who stands a good chance of tripping over his Sean Johns than someone sporting a pair of Nike’s latest performance-enhancing compression tights?

If the appeal of saggy pants is their criminal connotations, how does criminalizing them make them less glamorous? Instead of passing a bunch of ridiculous laws that will merely clog our legal system even further, perhaps all our armchair sartoria engineers could hire a bunch of paunchy, middle-aged white guys to start wearing their slacks shockingly low, thus destroying the cool factor of pants-sagging once and for all.

Or, put another way: At last, here’s a way for Joe the Plumber to truly help make America a better place.

GREG BEATO writes regularly for Reason magazine.