Watch your bumper.

Dwight Scarbrough used to be in the Navy. He was a machinist on submarines, some of them nuclear, in the Pacific from 1975 to 1980. Now he heads up the Veterans for Peace chapter in Boise, Idaho.

And he's not shy about expressing his opinion. At any given time, he may have as many as ten bumperstickers or peace signs all over his truck.

On February 7, at his day job for a federal natural resource agency, Scarbrough got a call from Homeland Security. An official told him to come out to the parking lot.

When Scarbrough got there, he found two armed officers of Homeland Security, who told him he was violating the Code of Federal Regulations--in particular, the prohibition against the posting of signs on federal property.

(Scarbrough, fearing trouble, brought a tape recorder along and captured the entire confrontation. You can read a transcript at the website of the Boise Weekly, which broke the story on February 15 in an excellent article by Nicholas Collias.)

"I'm informing you that you're in violation," one officer told him, according to the transcript.

Scarbrough tried to point out that those signs were not on federal property but on his own private property--his personal truck.

But they continued to demand that he remove them or be cited for a violation.

"You know this is total BS," Scarbrough told them.

But rather than risk getting a citation, and rather than tear the bumperstickers and signs down, Scarbrough moved his truck out of the parking lot.

The next day, Scarbrough says, he "drove around the parking lot and took pictures of about forty vehicles that had signs of them." According to Scarbrough, some of the signs said, "My Dad Is a Marine" and "Support the Troops."

Scarbrough has since returned to work, and to the parking lot, with signs and stickers on his truck bumper and doors.

And he hasn't been hassled again.

Neither the federal Department of Homeland Security nor the Idaho branch could help clear up what happened.

"It's not anyone I represent," says Lieutenant Colonel Stephanie Dowling, public affairs officer for the Idaho Military Division.

The press office for the federal Department of Homeland Security did not return phone calls for comment.

Back at work, with his adorned truck in the federal parking lot, Scarbrough seems to be doing just fine.

"One of my co-workers' wives made a cake for me with a pickup truck and signs on it," he says. "That tells you the sentiment around here."

Linda Laroca of San Diego has a bumpersticker on her car that says, "1360 Air America Progressive Talk Radio," referring to KLSD 1360 AM. That allegedly got her into trouble with her boss at Advantage Sales and Marketing, according to a lawsuit she has filed against her former supervisor and the company. The lawsuit, which was first reported on by Teri Figueroa of North County Times, gives the following account:

About three weeks after Laroca began working at Advantage Sales and Marketing, Laroca's boss, Beverly Fath, allegedly asked her to fill out some additional documentation for the human resources department. Fath reportedly told Laroca to meet her at a nearby grocery store's parking lot.

According to the lawsuit, Fath saw Laroca's bumpersticker and said, "That's that Al Franken leftwing radical radio station," adding, "You know our country is on a real high state of alert. For all I know, you could be Al Qaeda. I am going to just have to tire you."

Laroca was stunned. "I picked up my jaw and drove home," she told Ed Schultz on his syndicated talk radio program.

Laroca said the manager called her the next Monday and offered her the job back.

"She said, 'I was joking,'" Laroca told Schultz. Laroca did not return to the job, fearing a hostile work environment, her attorney, Marcus Jackson, says.

"Advantage Sales and Marketing does not, as a matter of law or policy, comment on personnel matters or litigation," says attorney Drew Bridges, who is representing both the company and Fath. "It litigates in the courts, not the press. Having said that, when Advantage first received these allegations more than six months ago, it investigated them and found them to be untrue."

Laroca, by the way, is now interviewing for a job at KLSD 1360 AM.

Denise Grier is a nurse at Emory University hospital in Georgia. On March 10, she was driving home when a DeKalb County police officer pulled her over.

"Any idea why I stopped you?"

"No."

"You have a lewd decal on your car."

He was referring to her bumpersticker that said, "I'm tired of all the BUSHIT."

Grier says she told the officer it wasn't lewd, and that it was clearly a political statement. When he insisted it was lewd, she said, "I'm not going to discuss this any further. Just give me the ticket."

Which he did.

Under "offense," it says: "Lewd decals."

The ticket is for $100.

Grier has no intention of paying it.

"I am so appalled at the officer's attempt to squash my freedom of speech," she told Joe Johnson of the Athens Banner-Herald, which broke the story.

Elaborating to The Progressive, Grier says people are wrong to view this in a partisan way.

"It's not just a Democrat/Republican issue," she says. "You all need to get beyond that. It's my right to speak, and yours."

Gerry Weber, the legal director of the ACLU of Georgia, is representing Grier. He says the Georgia Supreme Court struck down the "lewd decal" statute way back in 1991, in a case involving a defendant who had a "Shit Happens" bumpersticker.

The DeKalb County Police Department would not discuss the facts of the case.

"We don't comment on other officers' tickets," says Officer Herschel Grangent, who handles media affairs. "That officer is making his decision on the street. And it's going through legal channels now."

By the way, this is not the first time someone in Grier's family has gotten into trouble over a bumpersticker.

Last year, she says, her twenty-year-old son was pulled over in Athens, Georgia, for having a bumpersticker that said:

"Bush Sucks Dick.

Cheney Too."

She says the police officer told her son, "If you do not remove the bumpersticker, I'm taking you to jail."

So he removed it.

"He thought it was kind of funny," she says, though she told her son she would rather go to jail than take her bumpersticker off.

Here's an update on Deb Mayer, the teacher who said she was fired for answering a student's question about whether she would participate in a demonstration for peace. (See "A Chill in the Classroom," March issue.) On March 10, Judge Sarah Evans Barker dismissed Mayer's case, granting summary judgment to the defendants. Judge Barker said the school district was within its rights to terminate Mayer because of complaints it received from parents about her teaching performance. Beyond that, Barker ruled that "teachers, including Ms. Mayer, do not have a right under the First Amendment to express their opinions with their students during the instructional period."

Mayer says she's going to appeal: "It's too important not to. Teachers everywhere are at risk because of what this judge has said."

Matthew Rothschild is the editor of The Progressive. For a compendium of McCarthyism Watch stories, go to www.progressive.org.