Hello Freedomphiles! Professional harpie Gloria Allred has lucked into a righteous case. Breitbart reports:
"I wouldn’t wish this experience upon anyone," Mandi Hamlin said at a news conference. "My experience with TSA was a nightmare I had to endure. No one deserves to be treated this way."
Hamlin, 37, said she was trying to board a flight from Lubbock to Dallas on Feb. 24 when she was scanned by a Transportation Security Administration agent after passing through a larger metal detector without problems.
The female TSA agent used a handheld detector that beeped when it passed in front of Hamlin’s chest, the Dallas-area resident said.
Hamlin said she told the woman she was wearing nipple piercings. The women then called over her male colleagues, one of whom said she would have to remove the jewelry, Hamlin said.
Hamlin said she could not remove them and asked whether she could instead display her pierced breasts in private to the female agent. But several other male officers told her she could not board her flight until the jewelry was out, she said.
She was taken behind a curtain and managed to remove one bar-shaped piercing but had trouble with the second, a ring.
"Still crying, she informed the TSA officer that she could not remove it without the help of pliers, and the officer gave a pair to her," said Hamlin’s attorney, Gloria Allred, reading from a letter she sent Thursday to the director of the TSA’s Office of Civil Rights and Liberties.
Hamlin said she heard male TSA agents snickering as she took out the ring. She was scanned again and was allowed to board even though she still was wearing a belly button ring.
Look. There are two undeniable truths about nipple rings:
1. They’re hot.
2. They’re permanent
Do they ask Chris Isaak to take the metal plate out of his head when he goes to the airport?
"After nipple rings are inserted, the skin can often heal around the piercing, and the rings can be extremely difficult and painful to remove," Allred said in the letter.
So, the TSA says they were perfectly within their rights to force her to rip her ring through the skin of her breast:
On its Web site, the TSA warns that passengers "may be additionally screened because of hidden items such as body piercings, which alarmed the metal detector."
"If you are selected for additional screening, you may ask to remove your body piercing in private as an alternative to a pat-down search," the site says.
Hamlin would have accepted a "pat-down" had it been offered, Allred said.
Odd that they forgot the "pat down" method. Seems it would’ve been more convenient and also more fun. Allred sums up:
"The conduct of TSA was cruel and unnecessary," Allred wrote. "The last time that I checked a nipple was not a dangerous weapon."
Good point, but Allred clearly hasn’t seen Kristin Scott Thomas’ nipples in The English Patient.
Thanks to Bah Bay for the tip.
