Sanctity and Silliness Curt Jester posted about a…
admin October 23rd, 2006
Sanctity and Silliness
Curt Jester posted about a woman who is suing her suburban Chicago city government because the mandatory municipal vehicle registration sticker has a cross on it. (It actually has a soldier with a rifle kneeling before a grave marked with a cross, from what I’ve heard, though I have yet to find a picture of it.)
I think the suit is a bit silly – she’s arguing that it’s the “forced Christianization” of her car. But I have a few concerns that I voiced in the combox on Curt Jester’s blog, and I want to expand on here.
First, why does the municipal vehicle sticker need anything more than a registration number? Seems to me that it’s just a waste of taxpayer dollars to have some graphic designer cook up a design. Things like license plates and vehicle registrations, IMHO, are (or should be) strictly functional.
For the record, I have very little patience for the proliferation of different license plate designs here in the U.S. I think it makes it harder to identify an out-of-state plate (especially when a plate frame is used, as I use on my car to protect the registration sticker and get a service discount at my dealership). Used to be that a blue plate with white letters meant Michigan, a white plate with blue letters meant Ontario, etc. (Ontario, for what it’s worth, has thus far remained sane. They seem to allow veterans to have a poppy on their plate, and I’m sure I’ve seen a plate with the Shriners’ symbol, but that’s about it…so far.) I can just see accident witnesses trying to agree on the hit-and-run driver’s plate. “It had a sort of pink thing going on…” “No, I am *quite* sure I saw orange!” “Well, anyway, it was this sunset-looking thing…” Much simpler to say “It was a blue plate with white letters,” right?
My other big beef is with the city also. As a Christian, I strongly object to their assertion that the cross is a generic symbol. The cross – irrespective of whether there’s a corpus on it – is a symbol of the deepest mystery of my faith. There’s nothing generic about it. They’re either being disingenuous or they’re participating in the ongoing attempt to cheapen and discredit the world’s largest religion; either way I don’t like it.
What do the rest of you think?
