You might be funding a hate group and not know it
I'm back on the license plate beat.
Every year at the Arizona Legislature there are proposals for new specialty license plates adding to the already-long laundry list of current ones circulating through our streets.
This year, there’s an effort to add a license plate to the arsenal to support Phoenix’s professional soccer club Phoenix Rising.
It’s a weird, but mostly harmless priority lawmakers take up every year as a way for organizations to bring it more revenue from consumers (because consumers don’t already pay enough to these organizations, apparently). I say “most harmless” because one hate group based in Scottsdale has a license plate that brought in $330,000 from 21,000 license plates over the past two fiscal years.
If you’ve seen the “In God We Trust” license plates, those are the ones to which I am referring.
When license plates are approved, there’s a $25 annual fee for drivers who want to use each plate design –– $8 goes to the Arizona Department of Transportation as a fee and the remaining $17 goes to the respective organization.
In God We Trust plates are funded by the hate group Alliance Defending Freedom and the group has raised roughly $225,000 in the past two years alone from just the plates.
Between 2014 and 2019 the group brought in about $900,000 from the plates putting the total north of $1 million, but the plates have been around since at least 2009.
ADF always seems to be in the news pushing its anti-LGBTQ agenda and before SCOTUS for virtually every major “culture war” lawsuit. Usually something homophobic or transphobic, but also anti-abortion.
Their mission statement is “to keep the doors open for the Gospel by advocating for religious liberty, the sanctity of life, and marriage and family.”
Some of its legal cases it’s been involved in are: the Obama rule allowing public school transgender students to use bathrooms of their choice; the infamous Hobby Lobby case regarding preventing contraception coverage to employees for religious reasons; and Arizona's law defining marriage as between only a man and a woman.
It also successfully argued an anti-discrimination case against the City of Phoenix before the Arizona Supreme Court in 2019 for the “company” Brush & Nib1.
More recently, ADF once again made news for its connection to the “He Gets Us” Super Bowl commercials.
“The chain of influence behind “He Gets Us” can be followed through public records and information on the campaign’s own site. The campaign is a subsidiary of The Servant Foundation, also known as the Signatry. According to research compiled by Jacobin, a left-leaning news outlet, The Servant Foundation has donated tens of millions to the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal group. The ADF has been involved in several legislative pushes to curtail LGBTQ rights and quash non-discrimination legislation in the Supreme Court,” CNN reported.
While In God We Trust has the most notable and controversial recipient of the $17 charge in ADF, it doesn’t crack the top 5 most popular plates in the state. It also claims the money goes to “promote the national motto “In God We Trust.”
First Responder Plates are the most popular with 155,114 plates currently circulating (either from new or renewed drivers). Those plates directly fund the 100 Club of Arizona.
Roughly 95,000 drivers own an Arizona Highways license plate which goes to the Arizona Highways Magazine
Arizona Cardinals is just shy of Arizona Highways and those go to, you guessed it, the Arizona Cardinals with the intention of helping Cardinals-related charities “which supports programs designed to improve the lives of children, women and minorities in Arizona.”
Military Support/Freedom plates crossed 76,000 drivers and that $17 annual fee helps fund The Arizona Department of Veterans Services2
Arizona’s Historic Route 66 plates round out the top five with nearly 58,000. According to the ADOT website, those plates help with the “preservation of the historical federal highway” through the Historic Route 66 Association of Arizona.
Click the imagine for a full list of vanity plates, and you also may be wondering what about the copper classic car license plates roaming around? Those numbers are not reflected here unfortunately, but the qualification of “classic” might be subjective.
I covered this case for the Arizona Capitol Times and I’ve never been convinced Brush & Nib, run by GOP political operative Joanna Duka, was ever a real company. It doesn’t even appear to exist anymore.
I’m not sure yet how that money is being used, so I will look into it. It claims the money “goes to a special fund to benefit veterans in Arizona,” which is vague.