How to Legally Put an End to Sagging Pants

The Christian Science Monitor is reporting the Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York City, has announced that "New Yorkers Have a Right to Sagging Pants." Bloomberg's comments voiced his approval of a judicial ruling that threw out a case against a Bronx man who wore "low-slung pants that exposed his underwear."

I've wrote about this three years ago, when a Louisiana mayor made it illegal to wear saggy pants. Here's are reprise of that blog:

All you need to do to cure the sagging pants syndrome is to put a basketball in the hands of every kid with low riding pants and put them on a basketball court.

I discovered this cure when I was pastor of Easthaven Baptist Church in Houston, Texas. For seven years on Wednesday evenings, after prayer meeting, I opened the church's gym up to all the young people in the neighborhood around the church. There were a lot of kids who would come to play basketball who wouldn't come for any other reason.

The first few times the gym was open, nearly all of the African-American males and some of the Hispanic males wore their lowest riding pants. It was quite colorful. Every guy was wearing boxers of a different color and/or flashy print.

I made sure that the boys with the lowest pants got on the court first. With two half-court games going at the same time, I could keep twenty of those colorful behinds busy at the same time.

I let them play for five minutes, then I let the teams that were ahead play against each other on one end of the court, rotated the losing teams to the bench, and put fresh teams against each other at the other end of the court. Every five minutes we rotated teams again with the winning teams remaining on the court. We did that for 60 minutes -- 90 minutes whenever I had more than 40 kids -- with only a 5 minute mini-sermon at half-time for a break.

After the second week, I rarely had a player wearing low riding pants.

It's just plain hard to play basketball with the waist of your pants half-way down to your knees.