Md. high court upholds ban on vanity plate obscenity

It doesn’t matter what language you write it in — you can’t put s — — on your license plate, Maryland’s highest court has affirmed. The Court of Appeals last week upheld the Motor Vehicle Administration’s decision in 2011 to rescind a vanity license plate that read “MIERDA,” a Spanish word which can refer to filth, dirt, compost, or the related obscenity. Retired Judge Glenn T Harrell Jr. writes that the MVA was reasonable and “viewpoint-neutral” in taking away the plates. The MVA maintains a list of more than 4,000 letter-and-number combinations that are off limits, including obscenities, drug references, words that could be misconstrued as belonging to governmental vehicles, and scatological humor. The petitioner, John T. Mitchell, obtained an agriculture commemorative plate with the word in 2009. Two years later, the MVA received a complaint and looked up the word on the plate, determining it fit the criteria to be banned. Mitchell argued that “mierda” has a “variety of non-profane and nonobscene meanings, and that some of which, such