Updated at 12:45 p.m. Friday with additional comments from Bill Moore and the DMV.

Bill Moore would like to see President Donald Trump locked up. The state has told him he'll have to find another way to express those sentiments.

Moore, a Dallas resident, purchased a personalized license plate last year bearing the phrase "LOKHMUP," a play on President Donald Trump's "Lock Her Up" exhortations, referring to former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

Someone found Moore's plate offensive and called the state to complain, according to KDFW-TV (Channel 4).

The state agreed and recently informed Moore he will have to scrap his plate for a new one.

"I wish I knew if the person who made this decision was a registered Republican or Democrat," Moore told The Dallas Morning News.

Moore said the idea came to him after the 2016 election when accusations of collusion between the Trump administration and Russia began to spread. But he didn't act on purchasing the plate until March 2017 — not just as a reaction to Trump but also as a response to what he characterized as an overzealous response by the Justice Department to an ongoing sexual discrimination lawsuit Moore is a part of.

Moore's former partner, the late Don Zarda, filed suit in 2010 against his employer, Altitude Express, claiming the company fired him from his job as a skydiving instructor because he was gay.

After Zarda died in 2014, Moore and another member of Zarda's family became co-executors of his estate and joined the case as plaintiffs in his place.

The U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Zarda's favor in February, but the case has been appealed and now sits on the steps of the Supreme Court, which has yet to decide if it will hear the case.

Bill Moore received the letter from the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles on Oct. 23. He is appealing the state's decision to reject his personalized license plate. (Bill Moore / Contributed photo)

After Trump became president, the Justice Department joined the case and weighed in on the side of the business.

"I just felt like the government is trying to slowly chip away at all of our rights, and I wanted to do something," Moore said.

He also can't understand why it's OK for the president to express similar sentiments but Moore can't.

"Donald Trump screams 'Lock her up!' at every rally," Moore said. "I don't understand how he can do that, but I can't?"

The problem, the state says, is that the plate is considered derogatory, which is defined as "an expression that is demeaning to, belittles, or disparages any person, group, race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, or refers to an organization that advocates such expressions."

So why did the state approve Moore's plate in the first place?

"With so many plates that come in, language can change its meaning over time," said Adam Shaivitz, spokesman for the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles. "What might seem so benign one day could be interpreted differently over time."

The female equivalent, "LOKHRUP," has also been banned, Shaivitz said, but it has yet to appear on the state's list of rejected plates.

Last fiscal year, only nine active plates were banned, and seven were yanked the year before that.

Moore plans to appeal.

"I'm not inciting violence. It's just my thoughts that ... [Trump] is a criminal and he needs to be locked up, just like at his rallies when he says that all these other people are criminals and they should be locked up," Moore told KDFW. "It's the same difference, only no one controls him. But yet I'm a citizen being told that I can't do the same thing."