A North Carolina woman’s tongue-in-cheek crusade to keep her personalized license plate is making national news and even scored her an interview on “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”
It’s no mystery why Karly Sindy’s vanity plate went viral. Gracing the bumper of her Toyota Tacoma pickup truck is a Friends of the Smokies specialty tag that reads FART.
Flatulence jokes are a staple of the school playground and an ever-present pop culture punchline. References to the bodily function appear in a Shakespeare play, Chaucer’s classic “Canterbury Tales” and the James Joyce novel “Ulysses.” Yet some folks are grossed out by public references to gas-passing, and one such person spotted Sindy’s plate and complained to the N.C. Division of Motor Vehicles.
The DMV sent the Asheville resident a letter asking her to respond to the complaint by explaining what the plate’s message means to her. Sindy took her plight to Reddit and crowdsourced a clever defense: tell the state it stands for Friends of Asheville Recreational Trails.
To make the backronym legitimate, Sindy formed a hikers’ group and created a website using the name. She responded to the DMV and is awaiting the agency’s judgment. Somewhere in our great state, government employees are weighing whether to recall the head-turning tag.
And that’s where Karly Sindy’s offbeat, clickbait-friendly human-interest story gets a lot less funny.
The FART plate’s fate shouldn’t hinge on DMV officials’ whim. Revoking the license plate would violate Sindy’s constitutional rights.
In November 2020, a federal district judge struck down a California rule barring the registration of personalized plates deemed “offensive to good taste” for running afoul of the First Amendment. The court cited two Supreme Court cases, Matal v. Tam and Iancu v. Brunetti, that overturned a federal law prohibiting “disparaging” and “immoral or scandalous” trademarks.
California’s license plate rules constituted viewpoint-based discrimination, District Court Judge Jon S. Tigar concluded, explaining that government can’t arbitrarily decide what is and isn’t tasteful.
“Because there is no objective, workable standard of what is ‘offensive to good taste and decency,’ different reviewers can reach opposing conclusions on whether a certain configuration should be rejected based on their judgment of what might be ‘offensive’ or not in ‘good taste,’” he wrote.
A California court opinion isn’t considered binding precedent in North Carolina. However, judges analyzing the same Supreme Court case law aren’t likely to reach a different result.
What if the Golden State’s regulations were singularly sloppy? Couldn’t the Tar Heel State’s vanity plate restrictions prove more durable?
On its website, the NCDMV says it reserves the right to refuse submissions deemed “offensive to good taste and decency.”
Hmm. That language sounds awfully familiar, doesn’t it?
There’s also a striking similarity in the states’ challenge and appeal process for personalized plates. Like North Carolina, California provided motorists whose tags generated complaints with an opportunity to make their case against revocation in writing by explaining the personal significance of their chosen alphanumeric combination.
Though that issue wasn’t considered in Judge Tigar’s ruling, it presents its own set of First Amendment problems. Affording so much deference to one citizen’s complaint over another citizen’s speech establishes a heckler’s veto where a listener’s overreaction is used as a pretense to silence a speaker.
Some poor, uptight soul happened upon Karly Sindy’s license plate and had a hissy fit. So what? Our Constitution recognizes the right to self-expression. There’s no corollary right to have bureaucrats swoop in and shield our eyes from anything we might find offensive.
People who complain to the DMV about license plates they dislike should receive a perfunctory form letter thanking them for their concern. Then their complaints ought to be consigned to the paper shredder.
Maybe the public servants at our state Division of Motor Vehicles have too much common sense to revoke a funny, if sophomoric, vanity plate that harms absolutely no one and brings its owner a little motoring mirth. We certainly hope so. But even if Karly Sindy gets the proverbial green light, North Carolina’s regulations are presumptively unconstitutional and must be reformed.
Wayne Goodwin, who took the reins as motor vehicles commissioner in January, is an attorney who should be conversant with the constitutional issues at hand. As a state legislator and elected insurance commissioner, he’s been solid on open government and First Amendment issues.
Let’s call off the humorless license plate police, Commissioner Goodwin, before the courts have to step in.
Originally published by the Wilson Times.
