However, his apology shows that Chris does acknowledge the thoughts and feelings of his readers, and is ready to own up to the fact that he makes mistakes, and to make whatever amends are appropriate.

Wouldn’t it be nice if others took his lead… TSA… DHS… airlines… cruise ships… car rental companies…

You can’t compare the two statements. Being a fan of bondage and sadomasochism is a choice, one can’t help the color of their skin. One would clearly be wise not to say your statement…it is a sterotype. Chris’s statement was not.

For the rest of you who are complaining about political correctness run amok: the problem is not simply “thin skin”. Imagine for a moment if Chris’s post had been about a TSA agent stealing from travelers’ luggage and it had said “Turns out he was black.”

Just as African-Americans have often unfairly been stigmatized as criminals, and (this is the important part) that stigma has been used to justify government harassment against them and to limit their opportunities (e.g. we can’t have blacks working the register, because they might steal from it), those whose perfectly legal erotic and sexual orientations and interests lie outside the mainstream are often unfairly stigmatized as perverts who are probably rapists, child molesters, and the like – and they, too, have frequently been harassed by the government and had opportunities limited. For instance, the police have a long history of raiding gay bars, citing all sorts of miscellaneous laws against public indecency (which they extended to cover, say, two men dancing together or holding hands or kissing). After a compliant press published the names of everyone arrested, along with a lot of salacious but irrelevant details about the supposed voracious sex lives of these “perverts”, the charges would quietly be dropped – except that a lot of people’s lives, in the meantime had been ruined: jobs lost, family relationships disowned. This is not in the dark past; a raid like this took place in Fort Worth just a year or so ago.

More recently, the target has been BDSM-related organizations, charging every one present with whatever they can think of (usually trying variations of public lewdness and/or prostitution).

And the problem is complicated by the public’s mania for sex offender registries, which often sweep up every possible sexually-related offense and require public disclosure and prohibit living within 1000 feet of any place children gather. It’s one thing to apply such laws to child molesters and rapists; but these registries usually also include crimes that have nothing to do with children or violence, such as prostitution or public urination. It also includes consensual teen sex, typically targeting the boy but not the girl.

So yes, the BDSM community is VERY much on the alert for public portrayals of their interest in a light which suggests it has anything to do with crimes like sexual molestation.

Poster @Carabobarrel, above, really does have a sense of humor. Got a big smile from that.

As for the questionable qualifications of TSA frontline staff —- it reads better in Latin, but the quote, “Who shall guard these guardsmen?” seems to apply here.