With the election of President Barack Obama, the racists are out of the woodworks. Some are subtle in their racism – i.e. Tea Party crowd – while others boost about it.
That is where Virginia – where the Christian zealot governor recently inaugurated a celebratory Confederate History Month without even mentioning slavery – and its license plates comes in.
Virginians are creative people when it comes to license plates, the state has more personalized plates than any other even though it probably has less drivers than, say, the Los Angeles area.
But Virginians apparently also like to get creatively lewd and offensive with their license plates, so much so that the state’s DMV actually has an office dedicated toward vetting proffered license plates:
Virginia’s Department of Motor Vehicles is so accustomed to drivers trying to sneak lewd, gross, hateful or racist messages onto personalized license plates that it has a rigorous process to root them out.
A manager in the Personalized Plates Work Center reads through every application, putting any suspicious combination of letters and numbers into a computer program that analyzes the potential plate for hidden meaning. Questionable messages go to a 20-person Word Committee for review and a vote. Among the few printable examples of rejected license plates, according to Melanie Stokes, a member of the Word Committee, are “JERKA55,” “IPOOPD,” and “HORNI1.”
But sometimes a bigot is able to come up with a racist message coded so well that the censors fail to catch. That is where Bubba comes in. Meet his truck:
In case the subtlety is lost on you, he hates Islam and loves the Confederacy (or, as these hicks call it, the ‘Lost Cause’ or ‘War Against Yankee Aggression’). All this is clear.
But check out his license plate: 14CV88. At first it seems inoffensive and that is why the state’s censors let it pass. But it is anything but.
The state’s DMV was not able to crack it, but a Muslim-American group has:
Council on American-Islamic Relations, an advocacy group for American Muslims . . . complained to the DMV that the plate contained a white supremacist and neo-Nazi statement.
A few hours later, the DMV agreed that the plate contains a coded message: The number 88 stands for the eighth letter of the alphabet, H, doubled to signify “Heil Hitler,” said CAIR’s Ibrahim Hooper. “CV” stands for “Confederate veteran” — the plate was a special model embossed with a Confederate flag, which Virginia makes available for a $10 fee to card-carrying members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. And 14 is code for imprisoned white supremacist David Lane’s 14-word motto: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”
And they say Virginia is for lovers. The state presumably will now revoke this plate.
No word on whether the truck, shown in the photo in a parking spot reserved for the handicapped, has the requisite disability tags.
