The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments on the issue of when it was allowable for state governments to block certain types of messages on license plates. One view holds that license plates qualify as government speech thus subject to control, another that they constitute a public forum that would necessarily preclude government censorship. The specific issue was whether Texas could stop the Sons of Confederate Veterans from putting a Confederate flag on their license plates. (SCOTUSblog, March 23, 2015, by Lyle Denniston)
The Court is faced with the problem of allowing censorship in limited instances or allowing free speech even when the speech is objectionable and runs counter to public interest and values. The Confederate flag is a symbol of the cruel and violent repression of blacks in American. (Christian Science Monitor, March 23, 2015, by Warren Richey)
After an analysis of the public forum and government speech arguments, Noah Feldman in Bloomberg News, March 23, 2015, writes, “…there’s something worrisome about government speech doctrine expanding to include ideological product endorsements. The Supreme Court should probably take a more speech-protective approach, and treat the license plates as a limited public forum. Then the public would have to realize that there really isn’t any official government endorsement of license plate speech. At least not in the United States.”