This Man Was Told He Can't Use His "GRABHER" Vanity License Plate Anymore And He's Furious

    His name is Lorne Grabher, btw.

    Ishmael N. Daro
    by Ishmael N. Daro

    BuzzFeed News Reporter

    A Nova Scotia man named Lorne Grabher is fighting to keep his GRABHER vanity license plate after the province told him it could be misinterpreted.

    CTV Atlantic / Via ctvnews.ca

    The Grabher license plate has been in the family for 27 years, spanning three generations of Grabhers.

    In December, though, the province's Registrar of Motor Vehicles informed him the plate was being cancelled.

    “While I recognize this plate was issued as your last name, the public cannot be expected to know this and can misinterpret it as a socially unacceptable slogan,” the agency said in a letter.

    Grabher is furious at the cancellation. "Nobody has the right to discriminate against anybody's name," he told BuzzFeed Canada. "That's what you're born with and you should be proud of it. That's what my father instilled in his children, to be proud of who you are and the name that you stand for."

    Kelland Sundahl @KSundahlCTV

    This license plate has created a man vs. government situation. Lorne Grabher is fighting to get his personalized NS… https://t.co/zIwoJGYCIy

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    He believes the cancellation stems from a single complaint, which he says described his license plate as promoting violence against women. He doesn't think the complaint was necessarily connected to Donald Trump's infamous "grab them by the pussy" comment, but he says he doesn't want any kind of association with the US President.

    "Any man who would do something like that, there's something wrong with him," Grabher said of Trump.

    Grabher said he went through all the proper channels to get the situation rectified, including the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission, all to no avail.

    According to Grabher, one government employee even told him, "You are in Nova Scotia now, you go by our rules!"

    The whole ordeal has been hugely frustrating for him, Grabher said, but he's hopeful the government will step in and do the right thing. He said one of his granddaughters, who is 14, reassured him recently that there was nothing wrong with the family name. "I know that, and you know that," Grabher told her. "But there's ignorant people out in this world. They go out and try to destroy people."

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    The whole ordeal has been hugely frustrating for him, Grabher said, but he's hopeful the government will step in and do the right thing. He said one of his granddaughters, who is 14, reassured him recently that there was nothing wrong with the family name.

    "I know that, and you know that," Grabher told her. "But there's ignorant people out in this world. They go out and try to destroy people."