I'll be honest with you, I'm scared. Being safe is important to me.

And when it comes to my family, there is next to nothing I would not be willing to do to keep them safe. There are few sacrifices I would not be willing to make to keep them safe from harm.

The harm, for example, of being sexually assaulted.

What notion of safety demands submitting to sexual assault as a trade-off on the remote chance that the next attempted terrorist attack will use the exact same methods of the previous attempted terrorist attack?

What perversion of the very idea of safety demands a parent allow his or her child to be sexually assaulted?

And we are to submit to this, we are to force our children to submit to this, or face a fine. An $11,000 fine for refusing to submit to sexual assault. Ask any sexual assault survivor if there is a price she or he would not pay to not have to endure that pain. Or if emotional pain and humiliation aren't important enough to consider (as the authors of this policy apparently believe), if money is the only concern, ask what the cost of a lifetime of therapy would be for a child who was sexually assaulted ... while his parents looked on and did nothing. $11,000 seems a bargain in comparison.

Yes, I'm scared when I get on an airplane, scared that some deranged idiot will attempt to take my life and might even succeed, but the remote threat of death those few times a year that I board an airplane pales in comparison to the other threats I face every single day.

It turns out there is almost no limit to what I would do to keep my family safe, but there is a limit to what I would do to board an airplane. And I have reached that limit.