TSA Attacks Liberty and Institutionalizes Political Correctness
by Gary Aldrich
PatrickHenryCenter.com
The searches are so intrusive that they produced the following remark by a 7 year old girl to her Grandmother, “they touched you on your special girl spots.” Famous magician and comedian, Penn Jillette, had a similar experience and half jokingly commented, “Anyone is welcome to grab my crotch, I don't require dinner and a movie, just ask me. Is that asking too much? You wanna grab my crotch, please ask.” After the alleged, “crotch grab” the TSA agent involved stated, “Once you cross that line, I can do whatever I want.”
Even Secretary of State Hillary Clinton raised concerns over the pat downs and stated that she would not want to be subjected to them if she could avoid it.
TSA Administrator, John Pistole is aggressively defending airport security methods against the growing complaints. Despite the public outcry, Pistole informed the viewers of CNN’s Sunday show “State of the Union” that the pat downs would continue. Pistole was shown graphic examples of current techniques that are performed and agreed that searching the groin region and inside of the waistband on pants were acceptable procedures.
Addressing plans to hold a National Opt-Out day on November 24, where citizens would opt-out of the scanner and muck up the system with an abundance of pats downs, Pistole avoided debating the issue on its merits and attempted to appeal to emotions by begging passengers not to “tie up people who want to go home and see their loved ones.”
In a nation founded on and still espousing the concept of liberty, it is imperative that we develop lawful and efficient techniques for ensuring the safety of flights. The public debate brewing over the TSA should be viewed in the following manner: How can we protect our national security without subjecting citizens to unlawful and humiliating searches?
Not only are the TSA’s techniques unconstitutional, they also are an inefficient means of screening passengers. Performing the intrusive pats downs or as Senator Claire McCaskill (MO) labels them, “love pats” on senior citizens in wheelchairs and groping screaming little kids does not make anyone safer. Instead, it results in hostility towards the screeners and a chaotic environment.
TSA needs to invoke profiling measures into their standard operating procedures. Profiling is not racist; it is an effective use of intelligence while still providing for the maximization of civil liberties. Most agree society has eliminated institutional racism. Why do we continue to dance to the tune of self promoting hold outs? Individuals who explicitly state their racist beliefs are ostracized and alienated.
Profiling is a sensible alternative because it allows TSA agents to focus on specific threats as opposed to the entire general public. If you had information that a Caucasian committed a robbery, would it make sense to use resources to question African-Americans and Hispanics?
Nobody should imply that all Muslims or even a significant percentage of the Muslim population is engaged in terrorist activities. This is a response to the threat that we face from the radical ideology of Islamo-fascism. Having said that, they could help themselves by speaking out against terrorism. That they don’t raises obvious questions.
As soon as our intelligence determines that little old ladies and school children pose a threat to our security, we can start profiling them too. The goal is to keep us safe while also protecting our Constitutional liberties and we can accomplish this task by profiling the potential threats that we have gleaned from our intelligence. This is so easy, even a cave man can do it. So, why don’t we?
National security is one of the main roles that government plays. Despite their duty to keep us safe, they must remain within the confines of the law. If we allow the TSA to justify willful ignorance of the Constitution because their task is difficult, we adopt the same tyranny-laden attitude that we claim we are fighting against.