Not so friendly skies

Woman bounced from flight for T-shirt

A Washington state woman intends to press a civil-rights case against Southwest Airlines for booting her off a flight in Reno after fellow passengers complained about a message on her T-shirt.

Lorrie Heasley, of Woodland, Wash., was halfway home on a flight Tuesday that began in Los Angeles, wearing a T-shirt with the pictures of President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and a phrase similar to the popular film, "Meet the Fockers."

Heasley said she wore the T-shirt as a gag. She wanted her parents, who are Democrats, to see it when they picked her up at the airport in Portland, Ore.

"I just thought it was hilarious," said Heasley, 32, a lumber saleswoman. And she felt she had the right to wear it.

"I have cousins in Iraq and other relatives going to war," she said. "Here we are trying to free another country and I have to get off an airplane in midflight over a T-shirt. That's not freedom."

This is ridiculous (side note: great that she's a "lumber saleswoman"). As a CruzBustamante reader suggested, next time you fly Southwest, find something that offends you about a fellow passenger and ask that they be removed in accordance with Southwest's rules.

Personally, I'm offended by overweight, middle-aged middle managers in too-tight Wranglers and NASCAR paraphanelia reading Tom Clancy books but I seem to always get one next to me on every Southwest flight I take.

I'm offended by Aggies in buzz cuts, small children, crying or not, mullets (actually more amused than offended), people who bring fast food on a plane, people who give me bad looks as I'm ordering my third drink on a (long) flight, and especially the girl I sat next to once who worked for Rock for Life, "a teen-oriented collection of many bands who hold that abortion is the killing
of an innocent human being."

Southwest, it's on.