Sounds like it’s almost unanimous, then. Everyone hates the junk-touching, except of course for Gloria Allred.
Lest you doubt their sincerity, look at it this way: Considering how little money they make at TSA, if they were really into touching junk, wouldn’t they look for a more lucrative outlet for their “interest”?
Some comments from these TSOs include:
“It is not comfortable to come to work knowing full well that my hands will be feeling another man’s private parts, their butt, their inner thigh. Even worse is having to try and feel inside the flab rolls of obese passengers and we seem to get a lot of obese passengers!”
“Do you think I want to go to work and place my hands between women’s legs and touch their breasts for a few hours? For starters, I am attracted to men, not women and if I was attracted to women, it would not be the large number of passengers I handle daily that have a problem understanding what personal hygiene is.”…
“I was asked by some guy if I got excited touching scrotums at the airport and if it gave me a power thrill. I felt like vomiting when he asked that. This is not a turn on for me to touch me it is in fact a huge turn off. There is a big difference between how I pat passengers down and a molester molesting people.”
They’re having a rough time of it now but public antipathy should start to turn away from them and towards their critics beginning tomorrow. It’s National Opt Out Day, after all, which promises to make long delays even longer and to annoy harried passengers who are stuck in line behind opt-outers and hoping to zip through the scanner in time to make their connection. Meanwhile, the outrage du jour is that a select few government officials will be exempt from the new screening procedures when flying commercial. And it really is a select few — basically just the cabinet, congressional leadership, the head of the FBI and so forth. Most congressmen will have to endure the same crank-yanking that you and I might be subjected to. If anything, I think the big problem with that policy is that it doesn’t go far enough: Instead of demanding punitive frisks of public officials whom we know don’t pose a terror risk, we should encourage the feds to open up the exemptions policy and establish a broad-based “Trusted Traveler” program for the public at large. Watching Harry Reid get patted down would be fun, but humiliating the Beltway elites via a hard dose of equal treatment doesn’t solve the policy problem. Take the germ of a good idea that’s present — pre-screening reliable passengers so that they can avoid cumbersome procedures in the terminal — and grow it.
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