Alaska Lawmaker Victim of Latest TSA Outrage

By David Paulin

An Alaska lawmaker is the latest victim of an absurd TSA outrage. State Rep. Sharon Cissna, a 68-year-old Democrat, refused at Seattle's airport on Sunday to submit to the TSA's full-treatment - a hard-core pat down. She refused, she later explained, to be humiliated by the "invasive, probing hands of a stranger."

So she skipped her flight.

Now she's heading to Alaska via ferry, car, and light plane. She's expected to arrive

Thursday, according to an article about her ordeal in the Anchorage Daily News. Cissna had been in Seattle for medical treatment and has been excused from Alaska's legislature through Wednesday.

Cissna looks like an all-American grandma. So how come vigilient TSA personnel singled her out for extra screening beyond a full body scan and metal detector? It's because she'd had a mastectomy, explained her chief of staff Michelle Scannell. Apparently, a body scan turned up scars or a prosthetic device.

Three months earlier, Cissna had run into similar problems with the TSA and suffered the indignity of a full pat down. On Sunday, she decided she'd had enough -- even though it meant missing her flight.

As she was surrounded by police, TSA agents, and airline personal, Cissna said she repeatedly told TSA agents she would "not allow the feeling-up and I would not use the transportation mode that required it."

"Facing the agent I began to remember what my husband and I'd decided after the previous intensive physical search. That I never had to submit to that horror again!" she said. "It would be difficult, we agreed, but I had the choice to say no, this twisted policy did not have to be the price of flying to Juneau!"

It's doubtful, of course, that Rep. Cissna's fellow passengers felt safer from would-be terrorists because the lawmaker wouldn't be travelling with them. But at least they got to watch yet another absurd example of what TSA's critics refer to as the agency's "security theater."

Don't expect politically correct liberals to rush to the lawmaker's defense. For that, she would have had to be wearing a burka.