Maine puts the brakes on obscene vanity plates
I’m all for cute and clever personalized licence plates on cars — you know, of the punny sort I’m sure we’ve all seen in our travels. South of the 49th parallel in the state of Maine, though, some vehicles’ vanity plates have tended toward crude and vulgar instead. “How did that one get past DMV scrutineers?” Maine residents have likely been asking of some fellow drivers’ tags for the past few years. Well, in short, it sort of didn’t, and now the state has begun removing obscenities from plates, reports the Associated Press.
Maine started earlier this month issuing recall letters to people with newly unapproved license plates, says the newsire. The entire process should be wrapped up by year end, with a few letters going out daily.
It was October 2021 when Maine decide it was ready to start cleaning up its act with the profane plates, and if you’re wondering how we got here, it’s simple: the state pretty much just eliminated the review process for vanity plates in 2015. Who’s leading the charge now? Secretary of State Shanna Bellows, who, interestingly, is a strong supporter of freedom of speech and a former director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Maine. So if these plates are too much for even her, you know there must be some doozies out there.
“What I would say to those who want to engage in objectionable or questionable speech: Get a bumper sticker,” Bellows is quoted.
How bad is it out there? Well, with no review process in place, the state stamped all sorts of F-bombs, references to anatomy and sex acts, general insults, and more. Fill in the blanks here and you’ll get one of the more brazen plates actually issued in Maine: “F— Y0U”. (Who hurt you, angry driver?)
Maine’s new guidelines will line up with other states’, which ban derogatory references to age, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, religion or disability. Additionally, anything that incites violence, or is considered profane or obscene, is also banned.
A committee has been set up to review vanity plate requests, and to look over complaints filed by members of the public.
Numbers-wise, there are around 124,000 vanity plates out there among Maine’s 1.3 million residents. The state guesstimates about 400 offensive plates could be subject to recall, and nearly 40 recall letters had been issued as of mid-week late October, officials said. That rate could see the dirty plates wiped clean by year end.
It remains to see whether Maine residents get around the whole ordeal like some Canadian drivers do, with this sort of “creativity.”
