Those Nasty License Plates are Now Officially Being Taken Away By the State

It's been threatened for months, and now it's on.

We told you months ago that the state had found some sort of legal loophole to overturn a rule that allowed obscenities on license plates. If you look just about anywhere, you can find plates with F-bombs, and just about any other swear word you can think of. Yes, even that one. Many folks jumped right on the bandwagon.

As you'd assume there were also tons and tons of complaints to the state about people who didn't want to see that kind of thing in public. Some plates aren't so bad, but others have been so offensive, it almost seems impossible that they were able to get away with it. But, free speech is a real thing in our country, and you can't just deny that.

How did the state find a workaround?

Well, in short, the license plates aren't your property, as they technically belong to the state. Since you can't legally deface public property, such as a government building, the state successfully made a case that you couldn't put language like that on your plate. Again, because it's not yours, it's the state's.

Now the Associated Press is saying that the state has started sending out recall letters to people who have these "vulgar" plates, letting them know that their days are numbered, as far as their choices on their plates. When someone with one of these plates goes to register their car, they'll be issued a new plate.

Interestingly, of the roughly 124,000 vanity plates in Maine, this change only looks to affect about 400 people. But the letters have already started going out in the mail, and we imagine that some of those people are turning the air blue with colorful language about how they feel. I'm just glad I'm not a fly on that wall.

These license plates are from a much simpler time...

\