The Montana lawmaker who sparked a national media frenzy this week when he said he believed yoga pants should be banned in public, has since said he was being “sarcastic.”
After introducing a bill that would update the state’s public indecency law, state Rep. David “Doc” Moore (R) told an Associated Press reporter that “yoga pants should be illegal in public anyway.”
“Unfortunately I made an offhand remark to this young reporter in the hallway and I didn’t have my ‘This is a sarcastic comment’ quotation marks up about yoga pants. And that’s what she ran with,” Moore told TPM. “It was a totally sarcastic, Doc Moore brand humor, which I’m known for with my friends and associates over here.”
Although it appears that Moore was not serious about banning yoga pants, the Montana House Judiciary Committee voted unanimously to table the bill on Wednesday.
“Because of the press, or I mean the story, they just tabled it right away because leadership wanted it dead,” Moore told TPM.
According to Moore, members of the committee expressed willingness to amend the bill and clarify some of its definitions. But once the story received negative attention, the legislature no longer wanted to move forward with it.
“It was my fault because I made an offhand remark that was taken wrong,” Moore said.
He introduced the bill after his constituents expressed concern about a naked bike ride in Missoula, and he said that it had nothing to do with “yoga pants or any of the other nonsense that’s been reported on.”
“It really had nothing to do with clothing, although it does appear that that’s the takeaway people are taking when they read it,” Moore said.
The bill would have banned exposure of the nipple in public and “any device, costume, or covering that gives the appearance of, or simulates, the genitals, pubic hair, anus region, or pubic hair region.”
Moore had told the Associated Press that tight-fitting beige clothing may have been outlawed with the legislation. When TPM asked Moore if this was true, he said the bill needed clarification.
“Well, I think that’s where people kind of got wrapped around the axle on the words,” he said. “I think that if the bill had not been tabled immediately, and we’d been allowed to work on it, then we could have clarified that and made it more clear. Because there were some questions that came up about that in the hearing.”
The bill banned exposure of both men’s and women’s nipples, but only banned “any device worn as a cover over the nipple or areola of the female breast that simulates and gives the realistic appearance of a nipple or areola.”
Moore said that “the intent was not to single out one gender over the other.”
“I think all those problems that people are harping on would have been addressed given time,” he said.
The lawmaker said that he did not draft the bill himself, but that his constituents asked him to carry a bill based on other states’ indecent exposure statutes.
“Sometimes… you bring a bill for constituents that you know is probably not going to get signed into law, but it starts a discussion on the issues,” he said.
Moore said he believes the bill is dead for the session, but that someone may attempt again to updated the indecent exposure statute in the future.
And in the meantime, he’s just waiting for the media attention to blow over.
“What are you going to do at this point? You just kind of gotta grin and bear it and wait for the internet’s short attention span to disappear,” he said.
