Do the license plates in Tennessee allow cops to determine which drivers are atheists?

That rumor has been floating around for months, and it has some validity to it, but the full story makes the whole situation seem far less conspiratorial.

Some background is helpful here. In 2017, Republicans in the state’s legislature passed a law allowing drivers to get license plates with the words “In God We Trust” on them. They actually wanted to mandate those words on license plates, but when told that could lead to a lawsuit, they made it optional. Anyone getting a new license plate could choose between a secular template or a religious one.

(Should those words be on license plates? Absolutely not. But legally, they could get away with it, so they did. Welcome to the South.)

That, however, created a logistical problem for the state, because it meant there were now two different kinds of license plates on the road. It was therefore possible for two cars to have the same license plate numbers because they were using different designs, but those differences weren’t always clear from a distance. Bad news all around. ...