Originally Posted by
exerda
Your brother is wrong. The lines are generally (and in the vast majority of places) not operated by the government but by the airlines or the airport authority (as someone else pointed out, often a company set up to manage the airport commercially).
The lines then are just like those at the Starbucks at the airport. If Starbucks wants to give some customers a special line, they're welcome to and in no way violating civil rights.
I also don't understand why anyone would care that elite fliers have special lines. Getting rid of them won't make Ma and Pa Kettle's once-yearly experience with security significantly more brief, and why begrudge the folks who have to fly dozens to hundreds of times a year the ability to get through more quickly?
I was not aware that Starbucks was a government mandated "service". I don't know if elite lines are violations of civil rights, but there is something disturbing about a private company controlling access to government mandated screening, a screeing that every pax, regardless of status or fare, paid the same amount for.
Saying that the speed of a service (the length of the lines) is not part of the service does not make sense to me. If the wait for screening is two hours, who do you blame: the TSA, not the airlines or the airport authority.
This may not be a perfect analogy, but: What if the DMVs (car/driver agency) in your state leased office space from car dealerships, and only BMW drivers could use elite lines for services. Everyone else had to wait on the regular lines. Would this would be okay, since the lines are not "operated" by the DMV and they would feed to the same service counters? I think non-BMW drivers would disagree.
BTW: I am elite and yes, I do use elite lines. What gets me is the amount of venom some elites use when defending elite lines (not talking about user exerda here).