Number Plates News
I Don't Believe It!
16 November 2009
In a surprise decision, the authorities in South Carolina have been ordered not to issue number plates adorned with the phrase "I Believe". This relates to a campaign started by a Baptist church in far-off Colorado to allow similar plates.
District Court judge, Cameron Currie, attempted to clarify his position with the statement, "Whether motivated by sincerely held Christian beliefs or an effort to purchase political capital with religious coin, the result is the same." The gist of this rather flowery ruling is that the proposed plate decoration would violate the constitutional separation of the church and the state.
A rather predictable debate has ensued, with some tedious droning from both sides. But, hang on a minute, aren't they all making some rather sweeping assumptions? There seems to be no real indication to what the phrase "I Believe", in isolation, actually refers to. After all, people believe in many things, fairies, UFOs, the ability to fly, to name but a few. As far as we are aware, there is no constitutional conflict between the state and The Fairy Kingdom, extra-terrestrials or the singer R. Kelly.
A similar lack of objectivity is reported from the Netherlands, where the contention is not any perceived allegiance to a particular faith, but to political parties. Consequently, registrations including the combinations 'KKK' [no, we're not back in the USA - it's The Dutch Freedom Party] and NSB [a pro-Nazi party] are now banned because of their resemblance to the acronyms of the two extremist groups.
It goes without saying that any group of characters in the context of a registration code is, by definition, meaningless. Regrettably, such logic will stop neither zealots nor political namby-pambies screeching for their removal on the flimsiest evidence of any real or imagined offence.
Readers may be interested to refer to these earlier examples of plate controversy:
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