I was on a large school district’s committee to revise the Student/Parent Handbook a number of times and saw how the sausage was made.

Generally, there were some minor revisions unless some new law or local circumstances called for some major addition, subtraction, or modification to an existing provision with only one area guaranteed to ignite discussion, the student dress code much of which was based on old impressions never corrected with time.

Certain things were and would always be gang related and needed to be banned without defining terms, leaving it up to teachers to decide what was gang-related and sending the offender to the office for someone else to discipline according to whether or not they saw the item as gang-related and to what degree.

Application became not only open ended, but too often subject to various forms of prejudice. A simple popular style among an ethnic group most of whom the old-duffers making the rules assumed were in gangs became gang-related not because it was, but because the wearers just had to be in gangs.

Bans on clothing with sexual messages opened the door to mistreat Gay students because of the old assumption that Gay equals sex acts not people.

Rainbows equaled sex.

Girls could not wear spaghetti straps, low cut tops, or bare midriffs, forcing teachers to have to purposely look at girls’ shoulders and breasts throughout the day especially as the students passed through the metal detectors each morning and had their backpacks inspected, their jackets removed in case of weapons and dress code violations, and emptying their pockets, all for the sake of not distracting boys from their lessons with the exposed body parts, while boys had few restrictions to their distractions and could freely advertise their promise by its flopping around in loose fitting basketball shorts.

And we will no get into the hair style questions which, depending on the participants, was sometimes rather startling in the ignorance concerning race and culture.

The underlying reason for most open-ended and questionable terms like gang-related, sexual implication, or promoting violence, especially as a severed hand nailed to a small piece of wood with blood gushing from the wound was allowed on t-shirts because it had a religious implication not a violent one, was control of those people who some members of the committee did not have faith enough in to see them from the positive point of view that the majority would do the right thing but rather the paternalistic patronizing position of no one can do the right thing unless you show them or make them do what you assume it is, the attitude of the Great White Hope writ large.

Yes, some parts of the code were necessary for clarification not dictate, and there would certainly be those in a school population who lacked good judgement by nature or nurture, but why they became the benchmark of the dress code and not the majority was beyond me unless it was for control or subtle political and/or religious indoctrination in friendly territory.

So, when the Missouri House of Representatives came up with its new rules package this week that, after discussion, established a stricter dress code for women that included the requirement that female members of the House must cover their shoulders by wearing a jacket like a blazer or cardigan, the latter being added after it was pointed out that a blazer was very restricting for a pregnant legislator, when they are already required to wear “dresses or skirts or slacks worn with a blazer or sweater and appropriate dress shoes or boots,” it seemed the only reason for the discussion was to have it and establish that without the guidance of the men in clarifying the need for and meaning of a jacket or a jacket-like piece of clothing, women, without it, would not know what was meant by wearing “dresses or skirts or slacks worn with a blazer or sweater and appropriate dress shoes or boots.”

State Representative Ashley Aune objected to this move to subtly control the female members of the house with quiet intimidation by asking,

“Do you know what it feels like to have a bunch of men in this room looking at your top trying to determine if it’s appropriate or not?”.

Most high school girls would say, “Yes.”

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