Clothes call

T-shirt-wearing passenger sees free speech; airline sees trouble

By Todd Murphy

The Portland Tribune, Oct 7, 2005, Updated Oct 30, 2009

Lorrie Heasley says she just wanted to give her Democratic parents Ñ waiting at Portland International Airport to meet her flight from Los Angeles Ñ a laugh.

They never got the laugh. Because Heasley didn’t make it to the Portland airport. The Woodland, Wash., woman was kicked off her Southwest Airlines flight at a stop in Reno, Nev., on Tuesday because of the T-shirt she was wearing.

Two days later, Heasley calls it an egregious violation of her free-speech rights.

The airline says it’s simply a matter of following Southwest rules and dealing with someone whose profane T-shirt was offending other passengers.

The T-shirt Heasley was wearing was both political and profane.

It’s imprinted with photographs of President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice with words under it alluding to a recent movie, “Meet the Fockers.” The shirt changes one letter in the movie title.

Heasley, 32, bought the T-shirt at a shop at Venice Beach, Calif. Ñ “there were four stores down there that had them,” she says. She meant to buy the shirt for her mother, she says, but when she couldn’t find her mother’s size, she decided to buy one for herself and wear it when her parents greeted her at the airport. “Because I knew it would make them laugh,” she says.

Apparently, some of the passengers on the morning flight from Los Angeles did not share her parents’ sense of humor.

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