One of the nasty little consequences of 9/11 is that women find that they are getting treated like prison inmates. We mustn’t profile passengers at airport security checks, so that means that we must subject grandmothers to pat-down searches.
Peggy Noonan doesn’t like it. Secondary screening amounts to what we used to call, 50 years ago, “second-degree sexual assault.”
I was directed, shoeless, into the little pen with the black plastic swinging door. A stranger approached, a tall woman with burnt-orange hair. She looked in her 40s. She was muscular, her biceps straining against a tight Transportation Security Administration T-shirt. She carried her wand like a billy club. She began her instructions: Face your baggage. Feet in the footmarks. Arms out. Fully out. Legs apart. Apart. I'm patting you down.
It was like a 1950s women's prison movie.
Yes, Peggy, I see what you mean. I hate it too. I hate being treated like a child, moved around by government functionaries. A free people does not submit to government searches except on probable cause.
The question is, of course, just how much should the government do to prevent terror attacks? Should the transportation system be a hermetically sealed environment guaranteed terrorist-free, or should we the people be responsible for security?
When we cede responsibility for anything off onto government, then we are inviting the government to treat us like children. And it does. “Mr. President, is it safe,” we say? Pretty soon we have given up another piece of our independence and our freedom.
That is what I hated about 9/11. I knew immediately that the government would be expected to “do something.” And indeed it did.
What it did was strip the right of American women to be “treated like a lady.” And that is a shame.
What are you going to do about it, ladies?
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