City Council meetings can be quickly derailed by public comments, some of which are rude, vulgar, or discriminatory.
The Los Angeles City Council, for example, is a legislative body that manages one of America’s most important cities and meets three times a week.
During these meetings, “there are few speakers,” according to the Los Angeles Times, “normally casting racial slurs, anti-Semitic phrases, or other forms of linguistic abuse of city council members.”
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“They attacked the appearance of officials, their weight, clothing, sexual orientation and gender, and regularly condensed the lawsuit,” Ratt said.
Therefore, city councillors are taking the first step towards banning offensive language.
As first reported by Westside current columnist John Antier, on Friday, seven councillors signed a joint proposal banning the use of two words. NWORD – Racial Slur and C-word described by the LA Times as “sexist vulgar.”
LOS ANGELES, CA – October 20, 2023 – Gadfrey Armand Herman shouts racist comments before meeting at city council on October 20, 2023 at city hall in downtown Los Angeles. Herman often throws slur at public meetings. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times Getty Images)
The proposal, presented by Council President Marquez Harris Dawson, will ensure that audiences are removed from the meeting or repeatedly use those words to be banned from future members.
Speaking to the Times, Harris Dawson said that audiences using offensive language in fouls “give the cold to civic participation,” discouraged people from attending meetings.
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“It’s language that hurts when you say these things publicly anywhere outside this building where there are no four armed guards,” Harris Dawson said in the era.
The city council president, who came into the spotlight earlier this year when a catastrophic wildfire broke out when he was LA’s acting mayor during Mayor Karen Bass’ trip to Ghana, also said he and his colleagues may add words that were banned by the proposal over the coming weeks.
File – On Tuesday, March 31st, 2020, several people will be using Grand Park at the foot of Los Angeles City Hall in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terril, File)
It may not be easy to pass on a proposal as some legal analysts worry that the proposal violates the right to the first amendment and may not be able to withstand the challenges in court.
“It gives me sympathy for the city council,” Professor Aaron H. Kaplan of Loyola Marymount University Law School told The Times. “But I think it’s very easy for the court to say, ‘When there are a lot of offensive words, you can’t have a list of some prohibited words.” [and] Then there is discrimination against a particular perspective. ”
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Another legal expert, UC Berkeley Law Dean Irwin Kemerinsky, said the two words of the proposal, although deeply offensive, are protected by the First Amendment.
For now, however, Harris Dawson says his proposal aims to first eliminate the n-word and C-word from the meeting, especially since the two words “no political value” are intended solely to sham people.
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