Imagine being the sort of person who would fill out a license plate complaint form.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe every personalized plate in existence is in good taste. Quite the contrary — like any good, right-thinking American who appreciates the faceless bureaucratic order of a sequentially generated license plate number, I find most personalized plates to be tacky, obnoxious and gauche. Giving our state government up to an additional $50 each year to give you up to seven unique letters, numbers and perhaps a space or two on a piece of prison-stamped metal when you could just slap a bumper sticker on the back of your car for a few bucks strikes me as a poor investment.

I can’t express myself in fewer than 800 words. How am I supposed to express myself in fewer than eight characters?

Even so, the idea of being worked up enough about the contents of someone’s license plate to pull over and voluntarily fill out a Department of Motor Vehicles form strikes me as utterly alien. Who has that kind of patience, attention span or memory? I’m surrounded by thousands of license plates on any given day — why on Earth would I or anyone else dedicate any of the few neurons I have left toward memorizing one single license plate’s string of characters long enough to perform bureaucracy?

Yet that is precisely what one person who passed a license plate that said “GOBK2CA” did. That complaint, in turn, triggered an investigation from the DMV. The DMV, in turn, concluded that the plate violated Nevada Administrative Code 482.320, which prohibits vanity license plates from making a defamatory reference to a person or group — the plate, in this instance, apparently defamed Californians. They then demanded the registrant return the plate.

Gambling, sex work, late-night Sunday alcohol consumption and drug-fueled parties in the desert are all perfectly legal here — or, in the case of events like Burning Man and Electric Daisy Carnival, where attendees famously fail to confirm that their recreational chemicals of choice are legal before consuming them on-site, legal-ish. But telling Californians to go home on a Nevada-issued license plate? Well, now, that’s a potential threat to public order right there, and, by gum, our state government is prepared to put a stop to it.

Even Californians are laughing at this sudden bout of sanctimoniousness.

Interestingly, there’s a non-zero chance Nevada, constitutionally speaking, may not even be allowed to censor that license plate. As I pointed out last week, local and state governments don’t have a lot of legal leeway when it comes to censoring speech they don’t like on public property — which, incidentally, includes public rights-of-way and publicly issued license plates. 

A few years ago, California lost the power to ban “offensive” license plates after a judge found that license plates are private speech, not government speech — governments have the power to control what they say but are prohibited by the First Amendment of the Constitution from controlling what we, as private individuals, say.

A judge in Rhode Island, meanwhile, came to a similar decision regarding the Ocean State’s similar prohibitions against offensive license plates following a lawsuit filed by the ACLU of Rhode Island. After a similar decision regarding neighboring New Hampshire’s restrictions, Maine famously scrapped all restrictions for a few years — some people, however, were admittedly better prepared to fully predict and accept the consequences of their chosen speech than others.

Does this mean every state that produces vanity plates needs to issue profanity-filled license plates on demand? Not necessarily, as a recent court case in Hawaii illustrates, which is why Maine recently enacted a more limited set of restrictions on their vanity license plates. Both the California and Hawaii cases acknowledge that state governments have the power to engage in content-based censorship of license plates. Viewpoint-based censorship, however, remains flatly illegal. 

To help illustrate that distinction, if a state is going to prohibit profanity on its vanity license plates, it must ban all profanity as a class of content, not just the viewpoint expressed through select uses of profanity. States can ban “FCKBLM” (as Hawaii successfully did) provided they’re doing so because they ban “FCK” — they’re not, however, allowed to prohibit viewpoints expressed for or against, say, Black Lives Matter or the Bureau of Land Management.

The problem, in the cases of California, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Maine, was their restrictions prohibited vanity plates which were “offensive” or not in “good taste” — suggesting the existence of non-offensive government-approved speech which was, instead, in good taste. Deciding what is and is not in good taste, however, is not a responsibility textually delegated to any branch of government. For similar reasons, the government also doesn’t possess the legal responsibility or power to limit hate speech or speech that might be immoral or scandalous — even when that speech is being recorded by the government (the court cases involved relate to trademarks).

That’s an issue since many of the Nevada DMV’s restrictions — including the one invoked to throw “GOBK2CA” into the nearest recycle bin — restrict against viewpoints that are expressly protected by the Constitution and recent jurisprudence. Prohibiting “GOBK2CA” when “GO2CA” is permitted privileges the viewpoint that people should visit California at the expense of the viewpoint that Californians should go home. Additionally, the prohibitions on gang references and sexual connotations — which are both frequently invoked to reject vanity license plates — was expressly called out and rejected as an unconstitutional viewpoint restriction in California’s recent court case.

Speaking as someone who moved to Nevada from California nearly three decades ago, I’m well aware that many Nevadans have strong feelings about whether or not we should follow California’s example on anything. These feelings, in my experience, seem to be strongest among former Californians who believe they moved to a lawless tax-free amusement park once they left their home state. 

One rule that applies just as evenly in California as it does in Nevada, however, is the First Amendment — and it has already proven strong enough to strike down California’s unconstitutional restrictions against opinionated vanity license plates. Needless to say, if the Constitution is strong enough to push California’s state government around, Nevada’s doesn’t stand a chance.

David Colborne ran for public office twice. He is now an IT manager, the father of two sons, and a weekly opinion columnist for The Nevada Independent. You can follow him on Mastodon @[email protected], on Bluesky @davidcolborne.bsky.social, on Twitter @DavidColborne or email him at [email protected].