Searched for this and haven't seen it diaried as yet. I'll happily remove if I'm wrong.
Yesterday, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported a local woman cited in a traffic stop for a bumper sticker that read "I'm Tired of All the BUSHit," under this headline: Driver fights ticket for bumper sticker
Today, the AJC's editorial is headlined Fine, not bumper sticker, over line.
Tasty quotes below the fold:
A few choice paragraphs from the initial story:
Driver fights ticket for bumper sticker
Chandler Brown - Staff
Tuesday, March 28, 2006
It was 9:30 on a recent Friday night when Denise Grier saw blue lights in her rearview mirror.
She pulled over on Chamblee-Tucker Road, unaware of her infraction.
"The officer asked if I knew I had a lewd decal on my car and I thought, 'Oh gosh, what did my kids put on my car?' "
As it turns out, the decal was an anti-Bush bumper sticker Grier slapped on her 2001 Chrysler Sebring last summer. The bumper sticker --- "I'm Tired Of All The BUSH--" --- contains an expletive.
The officer "said DeKalb had an ordinance about lewd decals and wrote me a ticket" for $100, said Grier, an oncology nurse at Emory University Hospital who lives in Athens.
Grier said she thanked the officer --- and vowed to see him in court.
And from the editorial:
Fine, not bumper sticker, over line
Published on: 03/29/06
Put this in the didn't-he-have-something-better-to-do category.
What could have possessed a DeKalb County police officer to stop a motorist one night this month on the always-busy Chamblee-Tucker Road to ticket her for having a "lewd" bumper sticker, reading "I'm Tired of all the BUSH--"?
The driver, Denise Grier, a nurse at Emory University Hospital, is convinced her citation was for political incorrectness. And given that the hidden word in question is routinely used in full, unadulterated form in the context of political speech, it's hard to see this case as anything other than that.
It appears from other news reports that the "lewd" sticker ordinance was overturned in the Georgia courts years ago. As the AJC editorial puts it:
For their part, the DeKalb police should find the officer who wrote the citation and ask him whether anything else was going on that Friday night on Chamblee-Tucker Road that might have merited his attention.
Then they should make this ticket go away.
Amen.