Texas drivers can show Lone Stars and Longhorns – but not the Confederate flag

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/mar/24/texas-confederate-license-plate-ban

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Cars in Texas can sport a license plate showing support for the Dallas Cowboys, the Houston Rodeo or Big Bend national park. Drivers can buy an anti-abortion “Choose Life” plate, a “Don’t Tread on Me” revolutionary war plate, a “Fight Terrorism” plate and even one with a picture of a can of Dr Pepper.

But none of the 400-odd speciality plates gives Texans the opportunity to display the Confederate flag on the front and back of their vehicles, much to the chagrin of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, who have brought a free speech case that is now before the US supreme court.

The Sons are a group of male descendants of Confederate soldiers with about 30,000 members nationwide. In 2009 their Texas branch proposed a plate featuring their logo – a square Confederate flag. The idea attracted criticism from groups such as the NAACP and politicians including then-governor Rick Perry and Royce West, a state senator, who said: “Why should we as Texans want to be reminded of a legalised system of involuntary servitude, dehumanisation, rape, mass murder?”

Robert Notzon, an attorney who represented the NAACP at the supreme court on Monday, said in a statement: “I, myself, am a descendant of a Confederate army officer, but in honouring my great great grandfather, I have no desire to link him with the heritage created by the white supremacists using the Confederate battle flag as their banner while lynching and burning African Americans since the end of the civil war.”

Marshall Davis of the Texas division of the Sons said that the organisation has 2,700 members in the state and is focused on heritage rather than hate. “We would like to honour our veterans as any other service group is allowed to honour their veterans. Texas currently has Iraqi freedom plates, Korean war veterans plates, Vietnam war veterans plates,” he told the Guardian.

“We abhor and are very disappointed in and we come out against hate groups and racist groups and white supremacist groups that have misused our symbol, starting in the 50s and 60s. That flag and its use is more than 150 years old. My ancestors were invaded. The federal army carrying the American flag invaded the south, the southerners, feeling invaded, defended their homeland and went to war carrying that flag against an invading army,” he said.

The Texas department of motor vehicles rejected the design and the Sons sued, arguing the decision violated their constitutional free speech rights. Texas argues that because the plates are state-issued, they are “government speech” not “private speech” and so it has the right not to propagate symbols it deems offensive.

“To me, it’s about free speech and the heritage of 70 million Americans who are descended from those who fought for the Confederacy and those who supported them. There are a lot of us, and to us the symbol is benign. 99% of the display of that flag is benign,” Ben Jones, the Sons’ chief of heritage operations, told the Guardian. He is a former Democratic US congressman for Georgia and played Cooter Davenport in The Dukes of Hazzard – a TV show in which the Confederate flag was prominently displayed.

“Thirty million people watched every week without a complaint about that flag including all the black folks I knew. So I think this is just recent political correctness run amok … Those folks who find it offensive offend me,” he said.

But the battle flag “is a fighting flag that never flew over Texas,” Texas NAACP president Gary Bledsoe said. “Choosing this flag over other less strident symbols not currently associated with the white supremacist movement exposes this proposal for what it is – an unabated attempt to antagonise African Americans and exalt white supremacy.”

In recent years, many schools in Texas have responded to complaints over the use of racially divisive symbols by removing allusions to the Confederacy, for example by renaming sports teams dubbed “Rebels”.

Still, Texas’s rejection of the symbol might seem improbable. Other southern states, including Georgia, Alabama and Louisiana, allow it on plates, while, as the Texas Tribune notes, more than a dozen monuments and markers on the capitol grounds in Austin reference the Confederacy.

One plinth says, with more than a hint of resentment: “The people of the south, animated by the spirit of 1776, to preserve their rights, withdrew from the federal government in 1861. The north resorted to coercion. The south, against overwhelming numbers and resources, fought until exhaustion.”