National Opt-Out Day (http://www.optoutday.com/) is a new movement designed to protest the increasingly outrageous intrusions into personal privacy—physical privacy—by the totalitarian “Transportation Safety Administration,” a division of the unnecessary “U.S. Department of Homeland Security,” a spiraling, out-of-control bureaucracy that serves no realistic genuine purpose and is simply a state apparatus created to reduce freedoms in the US while habituating a largely ill-informed and passive population to ever greater state control over travel. The day chosen for the protest is Nov. 24^th, the day before the US Thanksgiving Day holiday, when many travel to be with family and friends, which in times past did not imply a “random” (supposedly soon to be universal) full-body scan by X-ray or a groping by a gang of taxpayer-funded petty tyrants.

Catholics are enjoined from civil disobedience as a general rule, but protest has not yet been so deemed by the so-called guardians of public safety; guardians of public morals they most certainly are not, as ample evidence of their shenanigans indicates. Catholics should stand united against such excessive and openly immoral measures as are now being carried out cloaked in the sheep’s clothing of “security.”

Those who wish to travel, as is their right, may “opt out” of the naked body scan and endure the “pat-down,” which may involve the touching of parts of another person’s  body which, were J. Q. Public to touch them, would constitute a crime. It has been suggested by the sponsors of the protest that one should “be sure to have your pat down by TSA in full public – do not go to the back room when asked.  Every citizen must see for themselves how the government treats law-abiding citizens.”

One might ask: “Back room?” Yes, a room out of the public view where whatever happens is witnessed by no one save for the gropers themselves. No witnesses, not easy to file charges if excesses are committed. No good.

A Nov. 10^th, 2010, report of a particularly outrageous incident was all over the internet shortly after it took place. One site (http://wewontfly.com/question-tsa-risk) posted the following: “The TSA chose Meg McLain for special screening. They wanted her to go through the new porno-scanners. When she opted out, TSA (Transportation Security Administration of the Department of Homeland Security, US federal government) agents raised an enormous ruckus. When she asked some question about what they planned to do to her, they flipped out. TSA agents yelled at her, handcuffed her to a chair, ripped up her ticket, called in 12 local Miami cops and finally escorted her out of the airport. Listen to her story as she told it on radio show Free Talk Live last night. Things are truly getting scary.”

If this is so, it is clear evidence that these branches of the government are rapidly turning the US into a police state and if the government does not act to correct this sad state of affairs, the risk is being run that the citizenry may begin contemplating acts of civil disobedience that go beyond simple protest, something alien to Catholic Social Teaching, but not at all alien to the secular-materialist mindset that has set this in motion.

Dangerous seeds are being sown by the very government that claims to represent its citizens and it seems that its agents are willing to reap the whirlwind within the confines of the country’s borders in the name of “protecting” it from its enemies—real and/or imagined—beyond its borders. Perhaps it’s time to turn them loose on the banks.