Tate: Season’s Gropings from the TSA

(John Tate) – TSA agents are gloved-up and ready to meet you as you travel this holiday season.

While Thanksgiving Day offers choices such as what kind of stuffing you prefer and just how much mashed potatoes is too much, flying to your destination may require deciding whether to be ogled or felt up.

If you and your kids, parents, or grandparents refuse to be seen naked, the TSA will proceed with an invasive “pat-down” procedure that is simply sexual assault by another name.

Campaign for Liberty warned about the TSA trampling our freedoms in January 2010, following the “Christmas Day Bomber’s” failed attempt to set off his “underwear bomb.”

As a result of the TSA constantly trying to play catch up, we must now take off our shoes, place our little liquids in Ziploc bags, and choose between potentially harmful, irradiating naked porno-scanners or a sexual assault that strips us of what dignity we have left.

As with other massive federal government overreaches, the TSA thinks telling us this is necessary for “our safety” allows it to do whatever it wants to us, including shredding our Fourth Amendment rights.

The government spends tens of billions on the TSA, our foreign intelligence gathering, and creating “No Fly Lists.”

Yet it was the flight crew and passengers, not a wasteful bureaucracy, that stopped the “Shoe bomber” and “Christmas Day Bomber,” even though the Christmas Day Bomber’s father tried to warn the American government about what his son was doing well in advance.

Tell your U.S. representative it is beyond time to restore Americans’ dignity when they travel. Urge them to immediately cosponsor H.R. 6416, the “American Traveler Dignity Act.”

Also, call the TSA at 1-866-289-9673 and email them at TSA-ContactCenter@dhs.gov to let them know what you think about their forced choice between pornography or sexual assault.

In a free country, we should never have to choose between total exposure or assault just to get on a plane. And we should never stand idly by while fellow citizens like cancer patients and survivors are humiliated into submitting to a bureaucrat’s idea of “security.”

While there are currently just under 400 porno-scanners in 68 airports across America, the plan is to have more than 1,000 scanners in airports by the end of 2011.

This is the time to demand change in the TSA’s policies – before their plans are fully in place and while the American people’s anger is growing.

Contact Congress today. Tell them you refuse to give up your liberties and that you’ve had it with the TSA!

(John Tate is President of Campaign for Liberty)