Politically charged plates.

Klippert, Jason ; Teigen, Anne

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Americans enjoy expressing themselves through their cars, and specialty license plates offer one way to voice support for a particular organization or interest. Renderings of a moose and fish adorn the "Support Wildlife" plate in Maine, for example, while an image of a bicyclist illustrates the "Same Roads, Same Rights" message on a Missouri plate.

State lawmakers have generally been supportive of the practice. All states allow some type of specialty plate, from seven in Nebraska to 700 in Maryland. But the states vary in their approaches to approving the plates. Washington has a special review board, while Ohio requires the director of the Department of Motor Vehicles and the legislature to decide. Most states require some kind of show of support, along with a fee, for a specialty license plate to be issued.

Profits from the plates typically go to the organization or interest they represent. Colorado's "Share the Road" plates, for example, raise money to educate cyclists and motorcyclists about the rules of the road and safe riding. California's "CalAg" plates support future farmers. Plate fees can raise significant amounts of money for nonprofits. Specialty plates raised $33 million in one year in Florida, including approximately $300,000 for the Hubbs Florida Ocean Fund from the "Discover Florida's Oceans" plate. Since 1999, specialty plates featuring a black bear have raised more than $3 million to support the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina.

As specialty plates have become more popular, they also have become more political-even contentious--in a few states. In North Carolina last December, a federal judge ruled that issuing "Choose Life" plates without a pro-choice alternative "constitutes viewpoint discrimination in violation of the First Amendment."

In Indiana, policymakers are in their fifth year of grappling with the constitutionality of the state producing plates with messages ranging from "In God We Trust" to rainbow-colored hands supporting the gay-lesbian-bisexual-transgender Indiana Youth Group. The debate has expanded to whether it is a legitimate role of the state to raise funds for organizations, and whether it should subsidize those organizations when fees don't fully cover the costs of the plates.

To avoid such controversies, lawmakers in Arizona and New Jersey have considered, but not yet passed, legislation restricting the number or types of specialty license plates.