FROM ONE NEWS NOW/AFA

Vermont DMV accepts John 3:16


Charlie Butts - OneNewsNow - 10/16/2010 3:30:00 AMThe Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has told Vermont that license plates referring to "religion" or "deity" are constitutional.

The case against the Vermont Department of Motor Vehicles officials, which began in 2005, involves a rejected request for a vanity license plate that referred to a popular Bible verse. Though the DMV has approved applications that refer to both religious and secular belief systems, Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) attorney Jeremy Tedesco reports that it denied the application for a plate to read "JN36TN."

"Shawn Byrne in Vermont wanted to put 'JN36TN' [John 3:16] on his license plate, and the state said that he could not do that because they banned all references to religion on vanity plates," Tedesco explains. "We had not prevailed in the court below, but the Second Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with us and found that the restriction on Mr. Byrne's speech was unconstitutional."

According to the ADF attorney, an array of other topics had been permitted to be displayed on license plates. "They were allowing everything under the sun. If you can think of it, it was allowed: anarchy, messages about peace, about love, messages about thankfulness to various people," Tedesco lists. "If you can think of it, it was on a vanity plate."

He decides that the devil often serves as the government in these contexts because they refer to the so-called "separation of church and state." But the conservative attorney points out that what the Constitution requires in this case is to give a religious message the same weight as the others that are permitted.