When accepting payment, or refusing payment of certain types, you must have a policy and/or not discriminate.
You don’t want to accept 50’s or 100’s? Fine. No problem.
You don’t want to accept 50’s from certain people who don’t look right? This is a problem.
If the **fascist police state **doesn’t like your commentary on the check (WHICH IS FOR YOUR USE) and refuses the check on those grounds, then they have a problem. It might take you a legal battle to prove you are right. They are discriminating and your free speech is at risk, too. I guess the is par for a fascist police state.
Said check contains no vulgar words and is simply a comment in the field for your use. They have no grounds to refuse THAT check if they indeed accept checks.
I had a customer give me the whole ‘this 100 dollar bill is legal tender and you HAVE to accept it’ crap…so I did. And then he waited for his change, which I didn’t have because it was 9am and the register didn’t have that kind of money. He got the police to come in and I explained that the man was hostile and insisted that I had to take the money.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that refusing to accept a check with something provocative on it is not an infringement of your First Amendment rights. What is your argument that it is?
The problem would be unequal treatment of citizens.
There would be no problem if they refused to accept checks from anyone. Or if they refused to accept checks without a picture id. Or if they refused to accept checks from anyone on a list of previous bad-check writers. All of those are common business decisions.
But they are refusing to accept a check because they disagree with a political statement written on the check. That is not OK.
I have seen checks imprinted with both pro-life and pro-choice statements, gay-rights issues, spay your pet themes, support our troops, etc. – political issues of all kinds are pushed through checks nowadays. Yet these are all acceptable to the banking system, and will work as valid payments (assuming there’s money in the account).
I suspect that courts are going to look askance at a claim that being forced to submit a check without having written something insulting on it constitutes anything close to an abridgement of a fundamental right.
If you do accept a check with something insulting written on it, could you sue for libel? After all, when you take the check to the bank, a third party will be able to see the insult. Could that be considered “publication”?
Yes, that would be publication, and you could sue.
Winning the lawsuit would be much harder, since from the OP I gather that this check was given to a government official, who would likely qualify as a public figure, so the much tougher rules regarding libel of a public figure would apply. The writer would claim that it is factually true, while a court would likely rule that it is a legitimate political opinion, thus not libel. I think it would be very hard to win a libel case over this, especially as it did not personally name the person that refused to accept the check.