Make specialty auto tags harder to get and keep

By Howard Troxler, Times Columnist
In print: Thursday, May 8, 2008

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God went only 1-for-2 in the Florida Legislature this year.

He did get a new state license tag bearing the slogan, "In God We Trust."

But the Legislature did not approve a more Christian-themed tag featuring a cross, stained glass and the slogan, "I Believe."

"In God We Trust" now joins the game of tennis, the preservation of lighthouses and the declaration that this is "Horse Country" as the subjects of Florida's 110th, 111th, 112th and 113th specialty license tags.

In a way, I wish the Legislature had gone right ahead and given the cross its own tag too, which might help us get this business cleared up in court once and for all.

Either that or it also should go ahead and create tags for Judaism, for Islam, for Buddhism, and even for atheists (I am thinking of the slogan, "I Do NOT Believe," and the rest of the design a blank.)

Or maybe — and I am just talkin' kooky here — maybe a government-created tag for the purpose of displaying a valid registration is not the place for expressions of religious or political beliefs.

(If only there were some other place on the back of a car for expressing beliefs …)

We started issuing specialty tags in the late 1980s, in honor of the space shuttle Challenger. Then they multiplied.

Former Gov. Jeb Bush kicked off the new era of controversial tags by approving the "Choose Life" tag, which last year was the 10th-most popular in the state, selling 39,878 copies.

(The most popular tag last year was the University of Florida's, which sold 105,361 copies. Numbers two through nine: panthers, dolphins, sea turtles, Florida State University, manatees, coral reefs, the U.S. Marine Corps and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.)

Good grief! Other tags honor golf, the state wildflower and the largemouth bass. We support the oceans, aquaculture, hospice, estuaries and NASCAR, along with every podunk college in the state.

At this point, it would be impossible to abolish them all by fiat. Every do-gooder group that gets a little bit of cash from them would rise up.

But I have an alternative.

The way it works now, to get a tag, a group has to do "market research" showing a potential market of at least 30,000. Some of the "research" has been shaky at best.

They ought to have to sell the tags up front — get people to put their money where their mouths are.

Secondly, our standard for getting rid of unpopular tags is far too low, with the cutoff being a puny 1,000 sales.

Too few tags have been phased out under this rule, including a couple of arena-football teams and the Girl Scouts. (They can sell cookies, but not auto tags?)

Let's raise the bar. If it were 30,000 sales, then only 12 tags would have made the cut last year, the 10 named above, plus the Challenger tag and "Support Education."

Each year, any tag that fell short would be put on "probation" for the next year, giving supporters a chance to save themselves. Otherwise, they would be out of luck, from the University of Miami (29,642 sales last year) to the Corrections Foundation (46).

Am I trying to suppress speech? Not at all. In fact, if God did indeed endow us with inalienable liberties, surely they include the ability to express our causes and beliefs for ourselves, instead of running to the government to do it for us.