Time to plug the work of a friend again. Hey, at least I am being up front about it. My Milligan College buddy Jim Dahlman was up in Washington, D.C., with me last week, teaching at the Summer Institute of Journalism. He saw the John 3:16 GetReligion item and immediately decided to plug into the kinds of sources you have inside the Beltway and do one of his Johnson City Press "Face to Faith" columns on it.
As you may have noticed, free speech is a big deal on this blog -- even the right to offensive speech. But who knew this was going to turn into such a hot topic with license plates? Basically, Dahlman tried to find out what people on both sides of the Vermont license plate battle were thinking. It all seemed so strange.
So what was this all about? The state authorities were worried that the John 3:16 vanity plate would cause (wait for it) road rage.
It’s not just religion, either. The law governing vanity plates prohibits any message that “might be offensive or confusing to the general public.†The statute is thorough, to say the least, banning “combinations of letter or numbers that refer in any language to a race, religion, color, deity, ethnic heritage, gender, sexual orientation, disability status, or political affiliation.â€
Careful, says the state. These plates are hot.
Some of you probably think I am making this up. The folks at the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center had trouble believing it, too.