Oral arguments are scheduled Monday in the Supreme Court about whether Texas must create specialty license plates with the confederate flag if they are requested to do so.
- From the Christian Science Monitor:
- From the Christian Science Monitor:
The United States Supreme Court on Monday is set to hear a dispute over whether Texas has the authority to bar the issuance of a specialty license plate featuring the Confederate battle flag.
The controversy arose in 2009 after the group Sons of Confederate Veterans asked the Texas Motor Vehicles Board to approve a specialty license plate that prominently displayed the Confederate flag.
In the century and a half since the Civil War, the Confederate battle flag has come to represent a symbol of Southern heritage for some. But for many others, including African-Americans, the flag is viewed as a symbol of fear, intimidation, and oppression.
Cognizant of this reaction, the Motor Vehicles Board voted to reject the license plate.
The Sons of Confederate Veterans filed a lawsuit, charging that the Texas board – which has approved messages conveyed by 350 other specialty license plates – had engaged in unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination in violation of the First Amendment’s free speech clause.
- From ScotusBlog:
If a state is forbidden by the Constitution to dictate the message that private citizens must put on their license plates, is it also forbidden to veto a message that citizens would prefer? That has been a lingering First Amendment question for nearly four decades, but the Supreme Court now seems prepared to answer it. The answer depends, simply, on whether the voice of the license plate is that of the government, or of the motorist.
In the famous decision in 1977 in Wooley v. Maynard, the Supreme Court treated license plate messages as a form of private speech on private property, but did not rule exactly that. Presuming it to be private speech, the Court said motorists could not be compelled to carry New Hampshire’s preferred message, the state motto, “Live Free or Die.” That mandate was challenged by a driver of the Jehovah’s Witness faith.
Six years ago, the Court made clear, in the case of Pleasant Grove City v. Summum, that if the government is acting as the speaker in a public display (there, a monument in a public park in Utah), it has the right to pick a message it prefers and exclude others.
