Why TSA Pat Downs are Ridiculously Pro-Life
By Sarah-Marie Hoduski
I am very sorry to be the first to tell you if you don’t know already that airport security sees your nearly naked form every time you queue up to fly out.
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) may be sorry about that as well, but the truth remains that security, the protection of lives entitles them to demonstrate disrespect to your physical person, time, and possessions.
Quotas are filled: one school teacher recounts being pulled aside by TSA for a voluntary strip search. Security told him the unlucky elderly woman ahead of him had actually had her number pulled, but they preferred to spare her. He consented. The illusion of Homeland Security is sustained.
Illusion is a fair word: 95 percent of TSA operations that are audited with planted weapons and other contraband fail, according to Forbes. Sustaining this illusion has a price—the right to privacy is suspended: the aura of strip searching elderly people, the contents of children’s sippie cups that are thrown away as the pretend possible makings of a weapon, and the tissue wrapped crystal clock that gets Hurtlocker attention are an expensive sort of make believe.
As a culture, we have waved privacy and suffer a great deal of indecent behavior sustaining a farce of saving lives. However, the greatest crimes against life in human history have been done in the name of a right to privacy.
Accordingly, why, for the imaginary, unconstituted right to privacy, that is so flippantly waved, do unborn children lose their right to live?
Most Americans may be surprised to learn that there is no right to privacy in the Constitution.
If there was a right to privacy, it would be suspended in cases of criminality.
For instance, if the police hear someone banging around in the trunk of my car, then I lose the right to privacy. I am not permitted to cart him away, and they are free to let the poor fellow out.
Unborn children should have the same rights.
The ACLU agrees, “The right to privacy is not mentioned in the Constitution, but the Supreme Court has said that several of the amendments create this right. One of the amendments is the Fourth Amendment, which stops the police and other government agents from searching us or our property without “probable cause” to believe that we have committed a crime.”
No, there isn’t a right to privacy, and even if there was it would absolutely be suspended in cases of criminality, not used to justify the right to commit that crime.
Abortion logic argues, I have a right to privacy, which makes having an abortion legal. However, if abortion is itself a crime, than the right to privacy is suspended. If the right to privacy is lost when someone commits a crime, then the right itself cannot be used to determine the action’s legality. If even the inferred right to privacy is waved in cases of criminality, than this right cannot be utilized in the defense of abortion.
The real issue in using a right to privacy to justify abortion is that it uses an underlying assumption that abortion is not wrong. Using a right that is waved in cases of criminality to prove that an act isn’t criminal is circular reasoning.
After all, what crime is permitted because the perpetrator demands the right to act privately?
People in trunks everywhere are gratified that a right to privacy is waved by criminality. People in wombs everywhere wish for the same respect for their lives.
We believe that: All men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.
Conspicuously absent is a right to privacy, and an individual’s right to life is premier in the Declaration of Independence. However, the truly universal qualifier of humanity is its equality.
The humanity of the unborn unequivocally entitles them to equal protection and rights, but they aren’t the first minority to be denied their rights. At one time in history, slaves were considered two thirds of a person and women weren’t permitted to vote at all. The denial of a natural right does not quell it.
The 14th amendment reaffirms the list of natural rights:
“No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”
The 14th amendment was included to end the enslavement of African Americans. Its tenants reaffirm every individual’s right to life. Ironically, this amendment was used to support Roe v Wade to discriminate agains the unborn. According to abortion advocates the right to liberty trumps another individual’s right to live.
This is nonsense.
Slave owners would have said that their right to property was more important than their slave’s right to liberty if they been permitted to dictate the importance of the rights listed. Slavery could still be justified under the 14th amendment if these tenants of life, liberty, and property had been warped.
Roe v Wade warped them indeed: neither the right to liberty or the right to property entitle anyone to take a life or make property out of an individual.
TSA pat downs send a ridiculously pro-life message: we value even the pretense of saving lives over a right to privacy. If we value life, then down with the warped and the wicked. Up with the endowed, the equality of the unborn!
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/danielreed/2015/06/08/the-tsas-95-failure-rate-be-carefull-what-you-ask-for-when-demanding-that-congress-do-something/#1eee0d7e7137
- https://www.aclu.org/other/students-your-right-privacy