It’s a small thing, a license plate.  On the scale of legislative achievements, in Rhode Island, managing to make “Choose Life” license plates available to people who are willing to pay an extra $40 upon their first car registration isn’t much beyond joint resolutions congratulating so and so for such and such an achievement. But it was too much for the state’s Democrat Governor Lincoln Chafee.

In practical terms, what Chafee did when he vetoed the bill to create such plates was to say to pro-life Rhode Islanders and those who believe in traditional morality, “You get nothing.”  You don’t get to maintain the longstanding dictionary definition of marriage.  You don’t get to have health plans in the state’s health benefits exchange that do not cover abortion.  You don’t get to keep a half-century-old banner with a generic prayer in your school.  And you don’t get to decorate your car with a license plate that you find more meaningful than the Red Sox Foundation or the Audobon Society.

Am I being a bit melodramatic?  I don’t think so; consider:

“This bill compels the state to collect and distribute funds to an organization that advocates a particular religious and political viewpoint,” said Chafee in the statement. “It is my belief that state participation in the transmission of funds to this organization would violate the separation of church and state, one of the fundamental principles upon which our state was founded.”

Let’s note, first of all, that the language Chafee cites for evidence in the previous paragraph — “share the love and truth of Jesus Christ” — comes from the Web site of the national CareNet organization, not the state affiliate to which the money would go.  The only mention of Jesus on the local affiliate’s site is on a sort of blog page tracing the organization’s recovery after a fire.  Does Rhode Island’s governor know what the organizational structure of the CareNet network is?  Does he care?

(By the way, given that this bill was so “controversial,” has any local journalist bothered actually to go to and learn about the local CareNet affiliate?)

Never mind, as well, that the nation’s largest abortion company, Planned Parenthood, received over half-a-billion dollars in taxpayer funding for fiscal year 2012.  There are areas of detailed argumentation to be had, on that topic, but it can hardly be argued that Planned Parenthood doesn’t “advocate a particular religious and political viewpoint.”  Unless, of course, what people like the governor mean when they speak of objective, secular organizations are those that believe that there is no God or objective morality that would make killing unborn children wrong.

I suspect the governor finds it irrelevant whether the CareNet affiliate’s relationship with the national network is as a financially interwoven part of the organization or more of a branding arrangement.  It is clearly his belief that traditional morality (for which he’ll accept no rationale beyond “God told me so”) has no place in government at any level.  Put differently, no matter how hard you try, if you have these suspect beliefs, Democrat Governor Lincoln Chafee thinks you should not be able to live under a government that accepts that your beliefs might possibly be true.

He’ll accept your being wrong in private.  You can even state your beliefs in public (albeit under increasing regulation).  You can create organizations that adhere to your worldview… at least until the government edges into their activities and begins using its power to edge them out, as it’s doing with childcare and healthcare.

But when it comes to the regime under which you live, you get nothing.