St. Louis Cardinals are like the Fighting Irish in their local fans amongst us

The Illinois secretary of state’s office has come up with what is, in some ways, just another money-making scheme – license plates allowing baseball fans to show their love of the St. Louis Cardinals.

For the set surviving around Effingham

Meaning one can get an official plate for their automobile that includes the famed “birds on bat” logo that the Cardinals have used for nearly a century. I can envision many residents of Southern Illinois choosing to identify their automobiles with such a plate.

PARTIALLY, IT MAY be a further way of identifying one as not being a part of Chicago.

But considering that the secretary of state’s office has offered specialized license plates identifying with colleges and sports teams for decades, it’s kind of shocking that they didn’t sign up with the Cardinals a long time ago.

For the Gateway Arch that is the prominent symbol of downtown St. Louis is visible for miles around into Illinois. Heck, Illinois includes a piece of the St. Louis metropolitan area amongst its residents – even though I don’t doubt that many Missourians wish they could somehow distance themselves from East St. Louis.

And some do think it bizarre that Illinois government would be willing to recognize a Missouri-based sports team.

BUT IF THE Secretary of State’s office has acknowledged both the Chicago White Sox and Chicago Cubs with official license plates and there is a significant chunk of Illinois where the locals don’t pay much attention to either team, then I suppose it’s only common-sensical to include the Cardinals in the sporting mix.

For sensible baseball fans

For what it’s worth, the state uses the money from the $69 fee charged of motorists who can’t just have a generic number identifying their automobile to support a state fund meant to benefit public schools.

Which almost sounds a bit like the rhetoric we’ve heard for so many years about Illinois Lottery money supporting education. We’ll see someday if there are merits to the rhetoric.

Or is this just an ego-boost to sports fans who want to say “shove it” to the fans of other teams.

NOW I KNOW the state is claiming this is the first sports team from out-of-state they’re acknowledging with their own license plate. Although I’d question the accuracy of such an over-statement.

For Fighting Irish faithful

Because the state also has a series of license plates acknowledging assorted public and private colleges. One of the schools included is none-other-than Hoosier-based University of Notre Dame. Where Fighting Irish football rules, regardless of which side of State Line Road one happens to live upon.

Is it really any more unusual for someone in Illinois to root, root, root for the Cardinals any more than the Irish football?

Besides, I personally will get a bit of a kick out of watching Chicago Cubs baseball fans be forced to acknowledge the fallacy of their biggest myth – that the entirety of the world roots for the Cubbies.

JUST THINK OF when Southern Illinois residents feel compelled to make the drive to Wrigley Field to catch a ballgame, and Cubs fans will see just now many people are present to root against them.

There is, however, one gripe I still have about such license plates – mainly that even though it has been a couple of decades since the collegiate plates were created, they still haven’t gotten around to offering up one in the green-and-white colors of my Illinois Wesleyan University alma mater.

For those who are just determined to be different

One can literally show their support for Milliken University in Decatur or the West Side’s Malcolm X College, And now even for the Cardinals.

Yet I’m still waiting for the day I can proclaim Fighting Titan loyalties while driving my car. Even though, to be truthful, I might well turn out to be too cheap to shell out the $69 fee (charged on top of the regular cost of registering a car) to actually buy the plate!

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U.S. Supreme Court takes a pass on taking ideological stand about abortion

Once again, we can see why it is a mistake to automatically assume the Supreme Court of the United States is some ideological machine that will automatically rule to uphold one conservative cause or another.

There are those people in the battle over firearms who are convinced that the high court will eventually shoot down the ban on firearms ownership within the city of Chicago, claiming city government has no authority to impose such a law.

NOW I’M NOT saying they won’t. The high court, after all, does have a 5-4 majority of justices who consider themselves ideologically conservative on many of the social issues of the day. And they do tend to think that the proper interpretation of the U.S. Constitution will produce a lot of rulings of favor to the social conservatives of our society.

But we got to see Monday some evidence that only a fool tries to predict how a court will react or even how a conservative will react.

It was on Monday that the high court chose to take no action on an appeal of a case involving Illinois’ specialized license plates.

There is a group that openly considers itself anti-abortion that has long wanted to have a specialty plate telling people to “Choose Life.” They say proceeds raised by the Illinois Secretary of State’s office for the plate would be donated to a group that tries to encourage women who don’t want their yet-to-be-born babies to put them up for adoption.

THE SOCIAL CONSERVATIVES got their kicks from this case when, last year, a federal judge ruled that Illinois was wrong for denying the group the ability to have this license plate.

He tried arguing that the state was interfering with a person’s right to use their automobile’s license plate to express their view on abortion.

Of course, that ruling got struck down late last year by the appeals court in Chicago, as a three-judge panel ruled (correctly, in my opinion) that the license plate by itself was not about speech.

The high court’s lack of action on Monday lets that ruling remain, although court watchers will be quick to remind us that such lack of action does not constitute an automatic endorsement.

NO MATTER. IT means the three-judge panel’s ruling remains the law.

That panel noted that since none of the dozens of specialty plates sold by Illinois motorists who can’t just settle for a standard issue plate to identify their automobile deal with the issue of abortion, it could be said that the state is not taking sides.

In fact, that has been the justification for allowing people to purchase license plates to identify their collegiate alma mater, but not for abortion – they’d rather not get involved in this issue that will tick people off, no matter what.

Because letting such a message on a license plate issued by a state government does wind up constituting an endorsement, of sorts, of that viewpoint.

IS THIS WHOLE issue of creating a license plate just a tactic by anti-abortion activists to force the state to endorse their viewpoint?

That may be a little bit strong, but it definitely comes off as forcing other people (motorists and pedestrians) to have to view one’s viewpoint, which in my book constitutes trying to use the state’s “muscle” to shove that abortion view down our collective throats.

It comes off similar to the situation in Indiana, where there were court cases until last year with regards to that state’s standard issue license plate – the one that reads “In God We Trust.”

The courts ultimately struck down the lawsuits in that case that tried to argue that such a message should constitute a specialty license plate that people should have to pay extra money for if they really want it on their cars that badly.

I’M SURE THERE will be some Illinois residents who live in the areas along the state’s border with Indiana who will wonder why their state can’t have some sort of “Christian” message (although I have always thought the whole anti-abortion argument to be so anti-mother as to be un-Christian) on license plates, while their Indiana neighbors can.

What I’d argue is that I wish we could do away with the concept of specialty license plates altogether.

The fact is that the only reason to have a license plate on a car to begin with is to make it easier for law enforcement types to be able to identify a moving vehicle.

If anything, having license plates of multiple designs and colors can add to the confusion in a case where a cop does have a legitimate need to know immediately who ought to be in a particular car.

I KNOW THROUGHOUT the years I have heard many police officers grumble about having to keep track of what constitutes a legitimate license plate and what does not. I’m sympathetic to their view.

So in the sense that the Supreme Court’s lack of action gives us one less type of license plate in Illinois, I’d argue it’s a good move. Now if only they could do something to get rid of some of these other plate designs, then we’d be better off as a society.

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I wish Illinois could make up its mind with regard to all of those old license plates

I’m about to “age” myself – I can remember the days when Illinois motorists received a brand new license plate every single year.

It wasn’t just that stupid renewal sticker that we paste over the old ones so that eventually, we have a half-dozen of those stuck on the license plate with the glue of the original sticker – which probably is how many years old?

WHAT MADE ME remember this was a story published in the Chicago Tribune about how the Illinois secretary of state’s office is having trouble getting some people to turn in license plates that appear to be defective.

By “defective,” I mean that the reflective coating that is supposed to make the numbers jump out so that police can readily identify any automobile from a distance is bubbling up.

That actually makes it difficult for the police to tell which car is which as they zoom down the highway.

That might be great for those of us who think that cop ought to have something better to do than bother us while we’re busy. But it does create a potential hazard for law enforcement.

IT TURNS OUT the defective license plates were issued between 2001 and 2003. There were about 1.1 million such plates – which comprise about one-tenth of all license plates currently in use.

What is bothering state officials is that they sent out notices informing people of the defect and a willingness to replace the license plates free of charge. Yet only about 1,000 motorists took the state up on that offer to get a new license plate.

It would seem that Illinois has bred a generation of people who are so conditioned to believe that the dinged up, rusty, unreadable license plate that has been on their car for years (and may very well have been transferred from a previous vehicle) is theirs for life.

The idea of a clean license plate on a car is something that is supposed to go away shortly after that “new car smell” ceases to be in the vehicle one has just purchased.

ALL IN ALL, it’s quite a difference from the days of my childhood, when I can remember my father getting a new license plate every year. It even reminds me of my stepmother’s father, who used to keep his old license plates and had them mounted on the wall in his old garage.

Now, the idea of having more than one license plate is an alien concept, just as much as the thought that people who published copy once wrote it on manual typewriters.

The idea of having the plate mounted anywhere except on the back and front of the car (except for those who refuse to put the front plate on as some sort of symbolic protest against “the man” trying to ID them) is unheard of.

What is pathetic is the new angle of this controversy, which was the point of a Tribune story.

IT TURNS OUT that the state is now sending out notices informing people that police are going to start looking for those unreadable license plates and will reserve the right to issue tickets to motorists whose plates they consider to be too dinged up for the police to be satisfied.

When one considers that I still have a problem with the lack of a driver wearing a seatbelt to be a primary offense, I really have a problem with the idea of police suddenly being able to pull a motorist over because he (or she) says there is a problem with the license plate.

It just seems like something that puts way too much discretion in the hands of the police officer.

It’s not like I have ever seen my car being driven so that I could tell how readable the license plate is while the vehicle is moving. I wouldn’t know how to contest such a charge.

NOT THAT MY vehicle’s license plate falls into this particular category. The plates I am driving on now were issued in 2007 (in my case, they are the third set of Illinois license plates I have had in my lifetime).

I don’t see that they are the least bit rusted or dented, and they appear to me to have the proper glare that would make them readable from a distance.

I am a far cry from a friend of mine who used to tell a story about how he once drove his now ex-wife’s car and got pulled over by a police officer in Missouri – who insisted on checking out the license plate up close because from a distance he thought it was a piece of cardboard, and was appalled to learn that the license plate on the car was (at that point) 14 years old!

At least the state is having the decency to replace the license plates they consider to be defective free of charge. That would be the ultimate insult – making someone have to pay another fee in order to avoid getting a ticket and a fine.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: The Illinois secretary of state’s office figures it still has to get nearly 800,000 (http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-license-plates-05aug05,0,4258888.story) defective license plates from the early 2000s off the road.