Pennsylvania’s Department of Transportation thinks so:
How is this legal, when a person can legally sign a document simply making an “X”? Many people’s signatures are so illegible anyway, they are little more than a scribble. Is the state going to now enforce standards of penmanship?
Signatures are more of a graphic device than a literal one. Every person has the freedom to develop their own personal signature, without editorial comment by the government. The state has no more right to determine how I sign my name than they do telling me how to pronounce it.
You can sign your name any way you wish, sure - but it’s down to the person reading it to decide if they accept it or not.
Like naming you can do what you want as long as you’re not seeking to commit fraud etc, in a case where you’re signing your name in a way that is obviously NOT your name then the argument could be made that that is what you’re trying to do i.e. if your name is John Smith and your sign your name George Bush it would make most people wonder. I sign my name in Arabic which which I can do, and if asked why I just say “why not?”, and it’s no different in my eyes signing my name in a shape that makes no sense to the reader than someone who signs their name with an inelligible swirl shape. But my sig isn’t by definition confusing, if someone reading it understood Arabic they’d know what my name was.
So if the man cited in my OP signed his name, “الله” , could the government object? Is that any more confusing to a person who cannot read Arabic than a squiggle?
They would probably be less likely to know that he was calling himself God, yes. So, if that was the basis of their objection (and I get the feeling it was) then I doubt the problem would been as likely to have come up. Given that the Allah in Arabic is seen quite frequently even in the West they may have realised, though.
I think in that OP it was what the man was signing his name as that was the issue, not that he wasn’t signing it as his name (unless his name really was god).
I agree. If he had signed “Elmer Fudd”, there likely would have been no objection.
So what this is really about is the appropriate use of a name of a religious deity, which here in the States is not supposed to be part of the official duties of the government.
Well see that’s what I would have thought. However, as I’ve mentioned here before, the Illinois DOT doesn’t seem to think so.
When getting my state ID, the friendly IDOT man who was serving me wouldn’t accept my signature because it didn’t match my Social Security card, which I signed when I was 5. My mother had to teach me, it was the first thing I’d ever written in cursive. But our hapless state employee was unable to comprehend how my signature might have evolved since then. They made the same stink when I went to get one of the new cards after I turned 21.
Seems in Illinois you’re stuck with your signature* for life*!
Many years ago I was arrested for DUI in Yazoo County, Ms. When the bondsman
came to bail me out I had to sign a “Promise to Appear”, which I did in the presence of
the female deputy and the bondsman. She looked at it and told me that wasn’t my
signature??? I told her that was ridiculous as she had just seen me sign it. She informed
me that if I didn’t write it so she could read it I was going back to the cell. I very
carefully resigned.