The Los Angeles City Council is claiming ultimate authority to ban the use of any terms officials deem offensive during public meetings. It won't end there.
" This unconstitutional overreach is why the First Amendment Coalition and my organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, sent a demand letter to the council: Repeal these rules now or face a lawsuit. "
Good on you, and I hope it works. A lawsuit would waste taxpayer money so I hope they do the right thing without being forced. Sadly, as someone who lived there, I don't have a lot of hope.
If we see a reinvigoration of the so-called "fighting words" doctrine, I think we can blame people who feel entitled to use such words against other people (literally face-to-face or nearly so) even though the speaker knows (and often even intends) such words will be personally extremely insulting. We can and should be better than this to each other.
Of course, there is no "First Amendment right to speak our minds." The First Amendment secures our freedom of expression and communication against abuses of power or usurpations of power by our public servants, but not other members of the public. So it's true that a public servant violates our Constitution by trying to prohibit or punish expression because it is merely offensive to a mere public servant. Even so, our public servants can quite legitimately and lawfully prohibit or punish some such expression in a "limited public forum."
This was the issue addressed by SCOTUS in Gentile v. State Bar of Nevada, 501 U.S. 1030 (1991). “When a state regulation implicates First Amendment rights, the Court must balance those interests against the State’s legitimate interest in regulating the activity in question.” “The restraint on speech” must be “narrowly tailored to achieve those objectives. The regulation of" expression in a limited public forum must be “limited” to apply “only to speech that” is “substantially likely to have a materially prejudicial effect.”
As emphasized in Rosenberger v. Rector & Visitors of the Univ. of Va., 515 U.S. 819 (1995), restriction of expression in a "limited public forum" may be legitimate if for the purpose of "confining a forum to the limited and legitimate purposes for which it was created." Our public servants may "exclude speech where its distinction" is "reasonable in light of the purpose served by the forum."
Even so, even in a “limited public forum” public servants “may not” ever “discriminate against speech on the basis of its viewpoint.” "When the government targets not subject matter, but particular views taken by speakers on a subject, the violation of the First Amendment is all the more blatant. Viewpoint discrimination is thus an egregious form of content discrimination. The government must abstain from regulating speech when the specific motivating ideology or the opinion or perspective of the speaker is the rationale for the restriction."
Freedom can be ugly. The alternatives are worse.
" This unconstitutional overreach is why the First Amendment Coalition and my organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, sent a demand letter to the council: Repeal these rules now or face a lawsuit. "
Good on you, and I hope it works. A lawsuit would waste taxpayer money so I hope they do the right thing without being forced. Sadly, as someone who lived there, I don't have a lot of hope.
If we see a reinvigoration of the so-called "fighting words" doctrine, I think we can blame people who feel entitled to use such words against other people (literally face-to-face or nearly so) even though the speaker knows (and often even intends) such words will be personally extremely insulting. We can and should be better than this to each other.
Of course, there is no "First Amendment right to speak our minds." The First Amendment secures our freedom of expression and communication against abuses of power or usurpations of power by our public servants, but not other members of the public. So it's true that a public servant violates our Constitution by trying to prohibit or punish expression because it is merely offensive to a mere public servant. Even so, our public servants can quite legitimately and lawfully prohibit or punish some such expression in a "limited public forum."
This was the issue addressed by SCOTUS in Gentile v. State Bar of Nevada, 501 U.S. 1030 (1991). “When a state regulation implicates First Amendment rights, the Court must balance those interests against the State’s legitimate interest in regulating the activity in question.” “The restraint on speech” must be “narrowly tailored to achieve those objectives. The regulation of" expression in a limited public forum must be “limited” to apply “only to speech that” is “substantially likely to have a materially prejudicial effect.”
As emphasized in Rosenberger v. Rector & Visitors of the Univ. of Va., 515 U.S. 819 (1995), restriction of expression in a "limited public forum" may be legitimate if for the purpose of "confining a forum to the limited and legitimate purposes for which it was created." Our public servants may "exclude speech where its distinction" is "reasonable in light of the purpose served by the forum."
Even so, even in a “limited public forum” public servants “may not” ever “discriminate against speech on the basis of its viewpoint.” "When the government targets not subject matter, but particular views taken by speakers on a subject, the violation of the First Amendment is all the more blatant. Viewpoint discrimination is thus an egregious form of content discrimination. The government must abstain from regulating speech when the specific motivating ideology or the opinion or perspective of the speaker is the rationale for the restriction."
Eventually … ‘you can’t disagree, it makes people feel unsafe’.
Understanding that speech control is thought control is the brightline test.
Implications include a civil way of avoiding or marooning those who don't understand why that's bad, from those who do.
That makes sense. Author Ray Noble once wrote a book titled "Show, Don't Tell."
https://hxlibraries.substack.com/p/when-collegiality-becomes-censorship
https://www.unbekoming.com/p/the-institutional-suppression-of
https://www.unbekoming.com/p/structural-rigidity