Virginia wants Confederate flag off licence plates

Praising fellow Governor Nikki Haley of South Carolina for her call to remove the Confederate flag from her statehouse’s grounds, McAuliffe said that Virginia should follow her lead.

Amid increasing pressure after the massacre at a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, of nine people, Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe is moving to ban state licence plates bearing the image of the Confederate flag.

Praising fellow Governor Nikki Haley of South Carolina for her call to remove the Confederate flag from her statehouse’s grounds, McAuliffe said that Virginia should follow her lead.

Virginia currently offers a specialty licence plate featuring the Confederate flag logo of a group called Sons of Confederate Veterans. But “even its display on state-issued license tags, in my view, is unnecessarily divisive and hurtful to too many of our people”, McAuliffe said.

The issue of displaying the Confederate flag has received even more attention in the wake of the Charleston shooting, in which Dylann Storm Roof is accused of murdering nine members of a historic black church. But the issue coincidentally came up in a Supreme Court ruling last week, in which the court ruled against the Sons of Confederate Veterans who were seeking to force Texas to issue licence plates displaying the flag.

The Christian Science Monitor’s Warren Richey wrote of the Supreme Court’s decision that “The question in the case was whether specialty licence plates represent the private speech of Texas drivers, and are thus subject to First Amendment protection, or are instead government speech, which isn’t subject to that same level of free speech protection.

“We hold that Texas’ specialty licence plate designs constitute government speech and that Texas was consequently entitled to refuse to issue plates featuring SCV’s proposed design,’ Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in the majority opinion.

He said states have traditionally used licence plates to convey slogans and other government messages. In addition, the plates serve a government function as essentially a state-issued ID for vehicles. Justice Breyer added that Texas effectively controlled the content of the plates through a board that exercises final approval over proposed messages.

If Texas didn’t exert such control, Breyer said, the state might be forced to issue plates with messages the state rejects. For example, the state’s ‘Fight Terrorism’ specialty plate, might prompt someone to request a specialty plate promoting Al Qaeda, he said.”

A 2002 federal court case decided that Virginia could not prevent the Sons of Confederate Veterans from putting the logo on its licence plates, but McAuliffe says he has asked Attorney-General Mark Herring to pursue the steps necessary to reverse the decision.

In the meantime, he has asked the secretary of transportation to replace the already existing plates depicting the flag, which he called “hurtful” to too many people.

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