My lease for my multi-family unit has an item:
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No signs or stickers may be placed facing out of windows, and no signs or stickers with offensive/inappropriate words, phrases, or symbols may be affixed to vehicles parked in the common parking lot. Cost of towing a vehicle in violation of this rule will be borne by the tenant.
Now, the problem is a conservative-but-totally-not-racist tenant who has, seemingly in the span of a single episode of
The O'Reilley Factor, become a huge fan of the Confederate flag in the wake of the removal of it from the various state houses in the south. He has affixed stickers of the flag to his vehicle, which does habitually use the common parking lot of the multi-family unit.
Given the flag's history, not even during the Civil War as the battle flag of
the most un-patriotic entity to ever exist legitimately inside North America, but as the symbol that resurged in the 40's, 50's, and 60's as a
symbol specifically against racial integration (
read your history - virulent political racists Strom Thurmond and George Wallace made this flag popular again), and the fact that explaining this history has no effect on the emotions of this conservative-but-totally-not-racist, along with the fact that the tenants in this multi-family unit are also of different races, I believe I should be enforcing this offensive symbol provision against the Confederate flag sticker.
I notified the tenant of the fact that the
flag of a country who engaged in open war against the United States after seceding from the United States over their desire to keep certain races enslaved is going to be considered offensive under the lease (and got owned, decimated, humiliated, wrecked, destroyed, schooled, annihilated, what a bunch of total losers), because I'm warning him in advance to give him a chance to remedy the problem before I actually have the vehicle removed. As expected from his previous denial of history, he is standing on another incorrect interpretation of history - that his freedom of speech under the first amendment is being violated, and that, like the gun he probably (definitely) has stowed away in the floorboards under his bed, this northern agitator will have to "come and take it."
I have already learned that these types of people, and the tenants they turn into, are essentially good little authoritarians and will immediately cower when anything is enforced against them, so I am pretty sure I will just have to tow his vehicle a single time before he drags his knuckles into the post-1960's, but I am curious how you would handle this type of person. He is effectively being belligerent about a small part of the lease, so I tend to expect further belligerence on other parts of the lease. My only problem with this is that this particular symbol has been effectively "re-classified" by popular opinion as more offensive in the past few weeks, but this tenant has only started using it in that timespan as well.
