Live Free or Die, vs. Choose Life.

Nevermind generational or other demographic sticking points -- this new First Amendment battle is really shaping up to be Libertarians vs. Nanny Staters ... right?

Years ago, the Supreme Court ruled you can't force a motorist to drive around with the "Live Free" tag, though it wasn't the living but the dying part he apparently objected to.

Now ... blame Florida for being the first to smell a money-making opportunity and helping confuse the issue of force vs. permission. Not that there's anything wrong with that -- the former anyway.

Florida started the trend in 1987, when it sold a specialty plate to honor the astronauts who had died in the Challenger space shuttle disaster the year before. It raised millions of dollars for a memorial, and these days the Web site of the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles offers many other options, including license plates celebrating Nascar, various sports (“Play Tennis!”) and parents who “make a difference.”

It also sells, for $20 extra, a bright yellow plate with the cartoonish faces of two smiling children and the words “Choose Life.” The state says it raised more than $33 million from specialty plates in the 2007 fiscal year and turned most of the money over to private groups.

The “Choose Life” plate generated about $800,000 that year. A state law requires that the money raised from those plates, after administrative expenses are deducted, be given to adoption agencies. The law forbids sharing the money with groups offering “counseling for or referrals to abortion clinics.”

Illinois, on the other hand, has refused to issue a “Choose Life” plate, a decision that was challenged by a group called Choose Life Illinois, which promotes adoption. The federal appeals court in Chicago upheld Illinois’ refusal in November, and this month the losing side asked the Supreme Court to return to the question of what the constitution has to say about speech on license plates.

The Supreme Court has turned back at least four requests to hear cases concerning “Choose Life” license plates in recent years. But the volume of litigation on this question and the doctrinal free-for-all it has given rise to in the lower courts have convinced many legal scholars that the court must soon step in.

There have been lawsuits in Arizona, California, Missouri, New Jersey and New York challenging denials of “Choose Life” plates. And there have been a similar number of suits on the other side, challenging approvals of such plates, in Florida, Louisiana, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Tennessee.

There are apparently only two states with specialty plates sympathetic to abortion rights. Montana has a plate that says “Pro-Family, Pro-Choice,” and Hawaii has an official decal that says “Respect Choice.”

Though Illinois refused to approve a “Choose Life” plate, it does have some 60 other specialty plates, including ones for the alumni of 18 different colleges, for people who support youth golf and for those who wish to assure you that they are “pet friendly.” Five different plates put hunters to the choice of declaring whether they like to shoot deer, ducks, geese, pheasants or turkeys.

Nobody's making a driver choose to pay extra to editorialize on their tag -- it's just a question of, if you open the door to some messages, can you then discriminate against viewpoints (like this one, for Christ's sake) and pull out the old boogeyman of "separation of Church and State", as if letting a religious person broadcast their beliefs is any more a state endorsement than letting another driver choose to pay extra to proclaim, Play Tennis!

That doesn't smell content neutral to me... Then again, I wonder just how much "Choose Life" is a religious endorsement. Couldn't the vegans and tree huggers get behind that one? And isn't public discourse somehow enriched by seeing competing viewpoints, like Respect Choice, which itself could be applied to a variety of living situations?I got one ... how about, "CHOOSE FREE SPEECH, and don't be so offended when you hear viewpoints that you don't like or necessarily agree with."

You see, I'm not a tennis hater really. Just found that when you allow the freedoms on the ground to flourish responsibly, it's amazing just how much viewpoint tolerance there seems to be. But take away those accompanying freedoms, and the free speech issues tend to become paramount (witness the prickly reception Ms. California recently received for espousing the same beliefs that President Obama publicly purports. If the law treated citizens equally on that issue, I suspect you'd see a lot more tolerance for verbal dissention, so long as the underlying freedoms were respected under the law. See: Abortion and those who respectfully oppose it.)

Put me down with the "Choose to Live Free" crowd. If abortion remains legal in Illinois, residents really don't have anything to fear from those who urge life, over the benefits of playing tennis, say. Nobody need confuse that crowd with the abortion clinic bombers, nobody thoughtful anyway.

Sometimes the Nannies really do their charges a disservice by thinking that they necessarily know best, and not allowing people to express their own views and make their own choices about what to put on public display. No thanks -- not interested in paying extra for that.