Steve Graham of Tools of Renewal has some very good words on the legality of the TSA searches.
Don’t Tread on Me, but Grope me if You MustRead it all, Steve is very smart and he lays out a very good case against the extreme searches. (that is the polite way to refer to them.)
The Price of Dignity: One Boarding Pass
Back when George Bush was President, it was a gigantic invasion of our civil rights when the TSA asked us to take off our shoes. At least that’s what many prominent liberals told us. Then Obama got elected, and Jim Carville said it was okay with him if the TSA measured his genitals. Not that there is a double standard, mind you.[....]This is the kind of thing the Bill of Rights was written to prevent. If you think otherwise, you are probably very stupid. At best, you are ignorant of history. The purpose of the Bill of Rights was to prevent government excesses. We were fleeing British tyranny, and the crown had a long record of torturing, confiscating property, performing unreasonable searches, prosecuting people without trials, and so on. We wanted to prevent our government from doing these things to us, so we drafted the first ten Amendments to the Constitution.[....]The Bill of Rights was not written just to keep you from being thrown in jail or executed or impoverished. It was also written to force the government to be polite. That is no exaggeration. So when the government demands the right to photograph or feel your vagina or scrotum, even for a few seconds, it ought to have a very good reason. And there is considerable doubt as to whether the TSA has good reasons for doing these things. The Israelis don’t do them, and their air safety record is second to none.The sad truth is that it’s better for a few hundred people to die in midair explosions than for an entire nation to submit to sexual abuse. If that sounds crazy, think about the things our soldiers die for all the time.
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