TSA Pedophilia

Government:  is there any vile thing that it won't do?  Hat tip Advice Goddess.

Make Your Child Pedophile-Ready
Another smart post from Mark Bennett at Defending People on the TSA, "TSA Grooming," about how his kids are no longer taking advantages of those things like a summer leadership program across the country:

Thanks to the Transportation Security Agency, such schemes are, for the Bennett kids, no more. We'll be driving--I'm not taking my kids to a place where a government goon can and is likely to, for no good reason, lawfully feel them up. (The TSA says it will only pat down children who set off the metal detector. This is small comfort: I go through enough metal detectors to know that there are lots of factors other than too much metal that will cause such machines to give an alarm.)

Lots of parents will say, "what's the big deal?" and blithely subject their young children to the possibility of an intrusive patdown for the convenience of air travel. For these parents, the family vacation to the ski slopes is worth exposing their young to genital groping by strangers of unknown provenance. I have little respect for this prioritization (I might even, in a snarkier mood, call it narcissistic). If a stranger on the street offered a parent an all-expenses-paid skiing vacation in exchange for the opportunity to pat down the parent's young children, the parent would be a pendejo to accept. The difference between that situation and the TSA patdown is that the TSA isn't offering as much compensation--it won't pay for the vacation; it'll only allow access to the transportation system.

If the parent said no and the stranger touched the child on the street in the manner of a TSA patdown, no jury in the country would convict the parent for beating the stranger. In fact, after having been beaten the stranger might well find himself cuffed in the back of a patrol car and facing charges of indecency with a child. And rightly so: we teach our children that their bodies are their own to control, and that no stranger need be allowed such liberties. The parents who bundle their children onto planes to hit the slopes set a price on the children's rights to be left alone--a price that should be set only by the child, once the child is old enough.

The stranger patting down children on the street wouldn't be committing a sex crime unless he were acting with sexual intent. And most TSA screeners--assuming that they're anywhere near the norm, sexually (maybe not a valid assumption--the authoritarian personality that would lead one to seek TSA work likely has associated paraphilias)--have no sexual interest in groping a preteen child. But to the young child, there's no noticeable difference between being groped by a stranger because mommy and daddy want to go to the beach, and being groped by a stranger because that's how he gets his rocks off.

Bennett had a suggestion in an email exchange we had (I wrote him about his posts I linked to the other day): That those who have to fly should be gathering TSA screeners' names and photos, and publishing them.

I published the name of TSA lackey Magee Thedala (or Thedala Magee -- I was upset after she stuck her latex-gloved hand sideways into my vagina four times, so I didn't catch which name went first), but I wish I'd snapped a photo. Those earning a living violating our Fourth Amendment rights should be exposed for it.

Another smart Bennett post on people letting people grope their children is here. He quotes the mother of the six-year-old groped on video by a TSA worker:

Cannot believe people are allowed to touch my child in this manner. The TSA should be abolished and anyone who has groped another person cited, fined and/or jailed for personal assault. I tried to stop this and was threatened with fines, jail and delay in getting to my destination. There are better ways to keep our citizens safe from terrorists. We need to find a way to keep ourselves safe from the TSA too. "Just doing their job" is an excuse used by people who do wrong.

Bennett writes:

I cannot believe it either, but I'm not the one who allowed it.

"Delay in getting to my destination"? There is nowhere I need to get in enough of a hurry to be worth letting you fondle a six-year-old.

"Fines"? Now you're trying to bribe me to let you molest a little girl. Shame on you for trying. And shame on me if I let you.

"Jail"? Ha! I laugh at your "jail." You think any jury anywhere in the Southern District of Texas would convict me of anything if I interfere with this sort of treatment of a six-year-old girl? Better men have spent more time in worse jails for lesser causes. Ha!

If I went through airport security with a child, I would be anticipating that the child would be touched inappropriately by the screener--it is, after all, according to Curtis Robert Burns, standard operating procedure.** Anticipating that the screener might try to commit standard operating procedure on the child, I would be alert and prepared to speak up, and to act if necessary.

It's easy to figure out what to do, given lots of time to think about the subject. But when nasty unexpected things happen to us, we don't always have the proper response at hand. For the parent who hasn't been paying close attention to TSA's trespasses, seeing this must have been like a descent into Wonderland. For the passenger who doesn't deal with the criminal-justice system every day, the threat of jail is a terrifying thing. The TSA's threats might even, in the heat of the moment, make a person question whether what he is seeing, which he knows is wrong, is really wrong.

Wrong does not become right because a government agent says it is. Even if Meemaw and Pawpaw are already waiting at the airport to pick you up.

I write in I See Rude People that there people shouldn't take loud children on planes. I'll amend that. People shouldn't take any children on planes. Where do you really, really have to be that you'll trade letting your child be groped in order to get there?