The Rosa Parks of Truck Nuts

If you don’t live in South Carolina, you’re forgiven for not necessarily knowing that truck nuts have assumed a potentially prominent place in Constitutional debate over the past month. South Carolina, you see, is where a 65-year-old woman named Virginia Tice is fighting for her right to dangle plastic testicles from the trailer hitch of her Dodge pickup.

Somebody had to stand up against those oppressive forces seeking to suppress one’s right to bear truck nuts, and old Virginia Tice, apparently, figured it might as well be her. Most people would have taken police chief Franco Fuda’s suggestion, when pulled over, and simply removed the red balls, with intentions perhaps toward imminent reapplication. But Virginia Tice understands that tyranny and injustice rely on nothing more than just such passivity. She let Fuda write her a ticket. The ticket was for $475. It was the day after Independence Day.

As soon as Tice got herself a lawyer–Scott Bischoff, from the local firm of Savage & Savage–Fuda asked for a jury trial, before Tice even had the chance to do so herself, and now the issue is on its way to the courts. “She’s such a sweet lady,” Fuda was saying to Reuters just the other week, “and she just says ‘I don’t want to pay the fine.’ We’ll let a jury decide if this is really criminal behavior.”

Jay Bender, a law professor from the University of South Carolina, has already made up his mind. He was interviewed by FoxNews.com and said, regarding Officer Fuda, “He’s nuts,” with no apparent humor that inclined toward the ironical. He said that the statute, as it currently exists, “doesn’t have anything to do with artificial bull testicles.”

South Carolina isn’t the only state where this rubber has met the road. In Virginia, Florida, and Maryland, truck nuts have been challenged, and they have always bounced back, scraped but buoyant and still strong. A Maryland truck-nut vendor made the perfectly valid–and perfectly stupid–point that “there are farms all over,” his thesis being that we end up seeing bulls’ balls all the time, right, and isn’t that, like, the same thing?

The statute Virginia Tice is challenging–the one she was ticketed for–prohibits “a sticker, decal, emblem, or device [that] is indecent.” Indecency then gets defined, within the same statute, as something that is “patently offensive…as defined by contemporary community standards, sexual acts, excretory functions, or parts of the human body.”

This isn’t over–even after South Carolina, it won’t be over. This is going to happen again, and it’s going to keep happening, until the Supreme Court finally rules on it. I’m serious about this; consider it a prediction. Meanwhile, we’ll just have to watch and see what happens at the end of this month, when South Carolina tries to tell us what nuts are, and 65-year-old Virginia Tice tells us, without even really trying, what nuts is.