Michael Higgins spent a lifetime acquiring good taste, so it came as a blow when his standards fell short of those of Oregon's motor vehicles department.
Higgins, a retired wine dealer, applied for a personalized license plate when he moved to Oregon from California in 1996: WINE. When that was rejected, he tried VINO, then IN VINO. Still no go. "Offensive," officials told him, citing state policy discouraging the consumption of drugs and alcohol. This, though the agency that runs the motor-vehicles department puts up blue highway signs directing motorists to wineries.Higgins sued and, more than two years later, remains embroiled in a legal battle, now before the Oregon Court of Appeals, to get some version of his tag approved. "I don't usually spend this kind of energy to get a license plate," he says. "But this fight is really important to me."
Here's a brave new world: The agencies that, in many states, are considered by drivers to be the epitome of poor service and rudeness are increasingly in charge of determining what's proper.
To the chagrin of free-speech advocates and many drivers, state motor-vehicle agencies are denying vanity-plate requests that aren't obscene or racist -- but still raise the hackles of bureaucrats there. California rejected HIV POS for a man with AIDS; Colorado ruled BADUSA inappropriate; Utah denied 2002NOT, a plate brooking opposition to Salt Lake City's efforts to host the Olympic Games.
The response to all this: a rash of lawsuits and a clash of wills between skittish state bureaucrats, worried about offending any number of ethnic, political or public-interest groups, and free-thinking motorists determined to have their say.
"It's not a public forum," declares J.D. Heaton, the deputy director for Utah's Division of Motor Vehicles. "We need to maintain a standard for the community" -- while admitting that community standards are slippery to define. The Utah division's detractors see old-fashioned politics and censorship at work, noting that it originally denied 2002NOT even though it had already issued 2002YES.
All states now issue vanity tags, and most have adopted written guidelines that, beyond racist statements and outright obscenities, also bar combinations ofletters or numbers judged to be "offensive," "repulsive," "vulgar" or "alarming." Some state agencies don't use written guidelines, relying instead on agency heads to apply some homegrown sense of fair play while protecting the public from odious speech.
In Tennessee, the plate stops at Martha Irwin, a 54-year-old whose department includes three other screeners in a small office with cream-colored cubicles in Nashville. "It's a gut feeling," she explains. Requests that slip by a computer blacklist of 2,000 words or terms are sometimes caught by the prisoners who hammer the plates out, or the warehouse workers who distribute them. All it takes is one call to Irwin.
Aside from the obvious obscenities, Irwin rejects anything she thinks is rude. FROG was denied to a frog collector for fear it might be interpreted as a derogatory remark against French people. Even some people's last names flunk if they "don't look good." It may not be exactly fair, says Irwin, but the general public doesn't know it's someone's name. "If we feel it's objectionable, that's our prerogative," she says.
One of the few decisions Ms. Irwin reversed was a request for ATHEIST, originally denied to Carletta Sims, director of the Tennessee chapter of American Atheists. Sims wanted her license plate to "show the world that people who reject religious beliefs don't have horns."
When ATHEIST was rejected, Sims called for an explanation; she was told her request was obscene.
"It suddenly hit me that I could be discriminated against because I don't believe in God," says Sims, who eventually got an apology -- and her plate. (Irwin says she originally deemed the plate offensive, not obscene.)
Personalized plates have been around since 1931, when Pennsylvania issued the first ones. But in the past few years, their use has exploded. Utah now has 35,121 personalized plates, up 28 percent from 1993. Illinois, which charges $27 above the standard license-plate fee, gets almost 5,700 requests a week. The Internet has also boosted sales: When Alaska started accepting online applications last year, orders rose 38 percent from a year earlier.
In the beginning, most people bought vanity plates to paste their names or initials on their license plates; before long, professions or hobbies became popular (DENTIST or FLYER, for example). But as the number of these plates has grown, so has the number of people wanting them for political and other expressions. The result: a big jump in the number of disputes between drivers and bureaucracies, many of which wind up in the courts.
In California alone, for example, there have been about 80 vanity-plate grievances filed since 1991. Generally, the California experience is mirrored in other states: When such cases reach state courts, those courts tend to side with the agencies that bar the disputed vanity-plate phrases.
But upon appeal to federal courts, those courts have generally recognized a First Amendment right to political speech and other nonobscene forms of expression.
Higgins, the retired wine dealer, is still waiting; it has been six months since three state appeals-court judges heard his case, which he lost in a hearing before Oregon's transportation department. In the meantime, he is driving around with a license plate that reads ZIN. That's short for Zinfandel -- a fact apparently lost on the agency that ruled WINE was offensive.