City council meetings anywhere can quickly be derailed by public comments, some of which can be rude, vulgar or discriminatory.
Take, for example, the Los Angeles City Council, a legislative body that helps govern one of America’s most important cities and which meets three times a week.
During those meetings, there are a “few speakers” who “routinely hurl racial slurs, antisemitic phrases or other forms of verbal abuse at city council members,” according to the Los Angeles Times.
“They have attacked officials’ looks, their weight, clothes, sexual orientation and gender, curdling the proceedings on a regular basis,” LAT said.
Thus, city lawmakers are taking the first steps toward outlawing offensive language.
As first reported by Westside Current columnist Jon Regardie, on Friday, seven council members signed a joint proposal prohibiting the use of two words: the N-word – a racial slur – and the C-word, described by the L.A. Times as “a sexist vulgarity.”
The proposal, put forward by Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson, would make it so that audience members could be removed from meetings or banned from future ones for repeatedly using those words.
Speaking to the Times, Harris-Dawson said that audience members using foul, offensive language has “put a chill on civic participation” and discouraged people from attending meetings.
“It is language that, anywhere outside this building where there aren’t four armed guards, would get you hurt if you said these things in public,” Harris-Dawson said, per the Times.
The City Council President – who was thrust into the spotlight earlier this year when devastating wildfires broke out while he was the acting mayor of L.A. during Mayor Karen Bass’ trip to Ghana – also told the Times that he and his colleagues may add more prohibited words to the proposal over the coming weeks.
Passing the proposal might not be easy, as some legal analysts worry that the proposal infringes on 1st Amendment rights and might not survive a challenge in court.
“I can feel some sympathy for the City Council,” Loyola Marymount University Law School professor Aaron H. Caplan told the Times. “But I feel like it would be pretty easy for a court to say, ‘You cannot just have a list of a couple of prohibited words when there’s lots and lots of other words that are just as offensive’ [and] then it becomes discrimination against certain viewpoints.”
Another law expert, UC Berkeley School of Law dean Erwin Chemerinsky, stated that the two words in the proposal, while deeply offensive, are protected by the 1st Amendment.
As for right now though, Harris-Dawson says his proposal will look to eliminate the N-word and the C-word from meetings first, as those two words in particular “have no political value” and are meant only to insult a person.
