Religion on your vanity plate
One of the fun road games I've always liked to play with my kids on long summer trips is spotting vanity plates. You may or may not be able to tell something about a person by the vehicle they drive, but a personalized plate certainly reveals much about a driver.
Whether it's the biker with "EASYRDR" plates or an older couple with the "TEA42" moniker, our plates can be an extension of our personalities.
In Canada provincial governments offer personalized plates that sport graphics of favourite teams, universities or even animals.
But it seems that while governments have no problem with veterans proclaiming their loyalty to their armed forces regiment (rightly so) or Toronto Maple Leafs fans exposing themselves to ridicule (also rightly deserved), when it comes to religion, proclaiming one's faith on wheels is a no-go.
Last December Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty had to personally step in to save the personalized plates of United Church reverend Joanne Sorrill of Whitby, Ontario, whose "crime" was that she had been sporting a set of personalized plates for 19 years that read, "REV JO." Some bureaucrats decided that the letters "REV'" could denote an "alcoholic, cooler-type beverage" of that name, and denied the plate on the grounds it could be construed as promoting drinking and driving.
Most people recognize "rev" for what it is: a reference to "reverend." Whether or not the people who review licence requests in Ontario had bias against the title for a Christian cleric will never be known. But I find it interesting that the province has a policy on personalized plates that puts religion into the same "objectionable" category as derogatory and profane words, racist innuendos and words of a sexual nature?
That sums up the worth of religious faith in the minds of some government types.
The debate over vanity plates that extol the virtues of your alma mater but not your faith should raise question about the place of religion in our society. In Florida state legislators recently avoided a fight with civil libertarians by backing away from selling Christian vanity plates. Proposed plates displayed a cross, a stained glass window and the words, "I Believe."
The proposal's sponsor argued that Christians should be able to express their belief in God the way college alumni and sports fans show their loyalty to their school or team. A similar proposal is making its way through the legislature in South Carolina.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) argued that the plates would send the message that Florida was endorsing a particular religion. Incidentally, the ACLU has also vowed to fight Florida's "Choose Life" vanity plates that help fund alternatives to abortion—a more worthy subject for debate than whether your car can carry labels like "JEZUZZ" or "JN 3 16."
Vanity plates are a fairly frivolous issue to fight over with humanists, civil libertarians and other groups who spend way too much time searching for evidence that Christians and other people of faith are seeking to make Canada the next great theocracy. But what does it say about our society when a people's devotion to their faith is seen as somehow dangerous?
This is an increasingly important question for both non-Christians and Christians as Canada's immigrants come from many countries where Christianity isn't the dominant faith.
Is our discomfort with Sikh turbans or Muslim burkas based on racism, as some claim, or are such outward expressions of faith a threat to the non-religious and hard-core secularists who make up a sizeable portion of the Canadian population (especially in our academic, judicial and media circles)?
In our drive to be "tolerant," are we eliminating the richness different faiths add to the Canadian mosaic, favouring instead the bland secularism of Canada's elites while ghettoizing anyone who dares proclaim "I believe"?
Canadian society is transitioning into a true multicultural society, not government-driven "multiculturalism" where Caribbean festivals and children dressing up once a year at school in a Ukrainian folk dance outfit are the only proofs of our "tolerance." If my Hindu friend or Jewish neighbour want to publicly proclaim their faith or—dare we say it—announce it with a vanity plate, then God bless them.
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