Not long ago the State of Texas banned the Confederate flag from license plates. Then fans of the old Confederacy sued the state saying that the ban was a violation of their First Amendment rights. The case went all the way to the US Supreme Court and today that court said that Texas had the right to ban the flag on its plates if it wanted to and that doing so was not a violation of the First Amendment.
One might guess that liberals would be shocked that Texas even did ban the CS flag on its license plates, but the state did nonetheless.
The case is interesting for who voted which way. Oh, it was just as you thought with the four liberal justices. They all voted to give Texas the right to ban the flag. Four of the conservative justices voted the other way. So, who was the tie breaker? Why none other than ultra conservative Justice Clarence Thomas!
In the majority decision, Justice Breyer is…
…making the case that plates are indeed “government speech,” which means the state can pick and choose the message it wants to convey. The way you can tell it’s government speech, Breyer says, is by the fact that many drivers prefer custom vanity plates even though they could convey the same message with a bumper sticker. It’s the government’s imprimatur that makes using the plate to carry your message special, in which case the state should have a say in whether it wants to be used to help broadcast that message.
The minority on the case said that it is a slippery slope in picking and choosing what government can censor.
So, what do you guys think? Good ruling? Or bad?