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First they molested the wives of 3rd-rate playwrites and then threw them into cells and had layers of cops lie about it, but I didn't say anything because I wasn't a 3rd-rate playwrite... Nice to see you have your priorities in order.

Nice to see you are so willing to believe this rant without question.

I'm less inclined than you to swallow this story without question, just because it may neatly fit some folks' preconceived view of the gummint.

Until some real evidence emerges, I'm with Snopes on this one, i.e.:

Claim: Man is outraged because airport security personnel touch his pregnant wife's breasts.

Status: Undetermined.

Example: [Collected on the Internet, 2002]

Origins: I was once good friends with a woman whose husband (whom we'll call John) was, to put it charitably, a decidedly "act first, think later" type. One afternoon I received a frantic phone call from this woman because John was in jail, and she couldn't raise the money to bail him out. Why had he been arrested? Well, it had to do with a routine traffic stop -- this couple had been carrying Oregon license plates on their cars for years even though they lived in California (because it was cheaper to register automobiles in Oregon), and a patrolman had pulled John over for a routine traffic stop to investigate why he was driving around in a car with an expired, out-of-state registration. John, irritated that a policemen would have the effrontery to accuse him of engaging in something illegal, took a swing at the cop and was hauled off to the hoosegow for assaulting a police officer. Of course, to hear the couple relate the incident later, John hadn't done anything wrong -- that he had done something illegal and had tried to punch out a cop was irrelevant; John's actions were a perfectly reasonable employment of self-defense, and if only that mean, terrible policeman hadn't provoked him, none of this would have happened. I suspected there was lot more to this story than I ever heard from John and his wife.

What to make of the airport outrage story related above? Reading between the lines of the one-sided account, we find something that sounds to us like a man and his wife being pulled out of line for a routine random search (it is reasonable for security personnel to verify that a woman who appears pregnant really is pregnant, as a faked appearance of pregnancy is a time-worn smuggler's and shoplifter's technique). Then, after hearing but a single statement with no context from his upset wife ("They touched my breasts . . ."), the husband immediately goes charging off to angrily confront security personnel, shouting and raging at them, even though he as yet has no idea what actually happened (which itself is reason to question the accuracy of this account). Acting hostile with airport security, yelling at them, and ignoring instructions to calm down are actions guaranteed to get one taken into custody, no matter what the circumstances, as a matter of standard procedure. And we're supposed to be shocked and outraged that this man got arrested? We suspect there's a lot more to this story than we're hearing, especially the part about bearing responsibility for one's own actions.

Last updated: 23 December 2002