These X-rated scanners peer through clothing to the body beneath: anyone who steps into the machine appears naked on its monitor. The technology currently infests a few dozen airports; eventually, it will curse every commercial concourse in the country. James Schear is the TSA's federal security director at Baltimore-Washington International Marshall Airport; he called these smutty scanners "the wave of the future" and says they "could eventually replace metal detectors at the nation's 2,000 airport checkpoints." And though the TSA presently subjects only “selected” travelers to this indecency, it plans to compel every passenger on every flight to pose naked. Only the Feds and Flynt could possibly imagine that terrorism excuses such wholesale wickedness.

We might have hoped this nationwide peep-show would provoke at least a peep from conservative Christians. After all, their lobbyists have long battled private pornography. Thirteen groups, including Concerned Women for America and the Family Research Council (FRC),  banded together in 2006 to crusade against dirty movies in hotel rooms. They bought full-page ads asking the Justice Department and FBI to investigate hotels for violating obscenity laws. "Anything that brings porn into the mainstream is a concern,” said Tony Perkins, FRC’s president. “It just desensitizes people."

Amen. And what’s more mainstream than an airport? Or more explicit than the images millimeter waves produce? "If Playboy published them,” says Barry Steinhardt of the ACLU, “there would be politicians out there saying they're pornographic.” Surely Christians who fret because some patrons freely choose smut in hotel rooms will denounce an agency that requires all passengers to expose themselves. 

But no. The TSA is one of the Bush Administration’s proudest achievements. So Christians who tried to sic the government on private, consenting pornographers sit shamefully silent as that government virtually strips teen-aged girls, little boys, nuns, preachers, missionaries, expectant mothers, and anyone else entering an airport. Nor are liberal Christians likely to defend decency: they’re too busy pushing homosexuality and playing Robin Hood to protest the TSA’s evil.

Ogling unwilling passengers isn’t the TSA’s first foray into lechery. But Christians were mum during previous episodes, too. 

One August night in 2004, two Russian airliners crashed within minutes and about 450 miles of one another. Investigators sifting the wreckage found traces of an explosive Chechen rebels often use; they soon learned a Chechen woman had bought a ticket on each flight at the last minute. Still, so little evidence survived the crashes that Russian authorities refused to blame the ladies or to speculate about how explosives made it aboard the planes.

That didn’t faze the TSA. From half a world away and with absolutely no proof, it decreed that the women had smuggled bombs aboard by strapping them to their bosoms – and American women might, too. The TSA’s screeners began groping female passengers.

Public outrage obliged the agency to halt this blatant abuse three months later. But that outrage came from the TSA’s victims and the ACLU, not Christians.

Calling the agency on its crimes isn’t difficult. The TSA is a national joke that has nothing to do with protecting us and everything to do with make-work, multi-million-dollar corporate contracts, and bureaucratic incompetence. If conservative Christians don’t want to join the growing chorus protesting the agency’s silly jihad against shoes and shampoo, they could raise their usual fiscal concerns. Why are taxpayers footing the TSA’s $6-billion annual cost? Why don’t airlines hire their own security, as do banks, malls, and other businesses?

Christians have traditionally defended the weak and helpless. So why stand mute as screeners pry elderly people from their wheelchairs and terrify toddlers with invasive searches? Ironically, if either Grandma or Junior had a bomb, screeners probably wouldn’t find it: they routinely miss anywhere from 65% to 90% of the weapons undercover investigators smuggle past them. So exactly what does their brutality accomplish? And why aren’t Christians objecting?

Christians could also point to terrorism’s tremendously tiny risk – the National Safety Council calculated that Americans had a one in 10,487,744 chance of dying from "war and other sequelae" in 2004 versus a one in 19,216 chance of dying in a car crash – and ask whether that justifies the TSA’s existence. It certainly argues against photographing all passengers in their birthday suits.

But no Christian organization has yet protested any of the TSA’s policies, however risqué, let alone called for the agency’s abolition. It seems these groups are conservative first and Christian second, lusting after political power rather than the cause of Christ. They have supported the Bush administration regardless of the TSA – and the regime’s other sins, such as unjust war and torture. Will these partisans finally rouse themselves now that Democrats are trampling the Constitution? Or will expediency once again trump Biblical principle and God-given liberty?

Though Christians aren’t likely to rescue us from the TSA and its pornography, perhaps Larry Flynt will. He’s got to hate the competition.

Becky Akers, an expert on the American Revolution, writes frequently about issues related to security and privacy. Her articles and columns have been published by Lewrockwell.com, The Freeman, Military History Magazine, American History Magazine, the Christian Science Monitor, the New York Post, and other publications.

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