Haters showed a ‘porn’ video at a SLO County meeting. That’s not free speech | Opinion

A sexually explicit video and slides were displayed during public comment at Tuesday’s San Luis Obispo County Board of Supervisors meeting — all part of an offensive and bizarre effort to discredit LGBTQ+ Pride.

Some viewers described the visuals as pornographic; the meeting video posted on the county’s website has the images heavily blurred and wasn’t posted until Thursday.

The video, filmed at a San Francisco Pride event, included scenes of full-frontal male nudity and oral sex.

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The slides included images that purported to show breasts and genitals of patients in the process of gender-reassignment surgery. One set of before-and-after photos showed a young girl with long hair in the first photo, and a bare-chested boy with bandages on his nipples in the second. Next to the photos was this question: “How old was this little girl when MD’s cut off her healthy breasts?”

It was all a shocking display at a government meeting — and should lead the board to either ban visual aids at future public comment sessions or require that they be pre-approved.

The speakers responsible for the presentation were there to oppose passage of a resolution recognizing Pride Month — an action that had been scheduled for June, but was postponed to July due to the absence of Supervisor Jimmy Paulding.

The video and photos were intended to serve as a warning: If supervisors approved the Pride declaration, they would be opening the door to all sorts of ungodly behavior in San Luis Obispo County.

“By accepting Pride Month ... you are bringing this to our community,” one speaker said, referencing the behavior shown in the film. “It has nothing to do with consenting adults and everything to do with pedophilia and lewd behavior in public. You heard them; they just want to walk around naked in a crowd. So if that’s what you want, approve the agenda item.”

Never mind that local governments in SLO County have been flying the Pride Flag and passing Pride resolutions for years, and we’ve yet to see any nude Pride paraders marching down the streets of our cities and towns.

Or that the resolution — which eventually passed on a 3-1 vote with one abstention — is completely nonbinding and will probably be read by just a handful of individuals.

Or that San Luis Obispo County is hardly San Francisco, a distant and very different community that has a much more relaxed attitude toward public nudity.

‘You can turn your head’

Ironically, the video and photos shown at the Board of Supervisors meeting were so explicit that one speaker found it necessary to deliver a “trigger warning” before starting her presentation — not what you would expect from self-appointed morality police.

One member of the audience requested that the board stop the video but was shouted down.

Supervisor Jimmy Paulding interrupted the presentation to ask county counsel Rita Neal whether the board chair, Supervisor Debbie Arnold, could intervene.

Neal gave a rather vague response.

“Pornography is in the eye of the beholder,” she said. “I would just ask that people be respectful of the audience that we have. This is a public meeting, and I think the chair can certainly request that our speakers and images — that they should be respectful to all.”

In a hasty decision, Arnold allowed the video to continue.

“If anything is offensive to you, you can turn your head or close your eyes, but we’ve been advised to continue with public comment,” she said.

Some members of the audience averted their eyes, while others, including Supervisor John Peschong, stepped out of the room.

Paulding found it necessary to interrupt a second time: “We’re seeing pornographic images, which perhaps run afoul of First Amendment rights,” he said.

If he’s incorrect — if such images truly are protected under the law — then we’re in trouble.

A public meeting open to all ages and broadcast online is not the venue for sexually explicit images, and offering a “trigger warning” does not make it OK.

It makes absolutely no sense to have strict rules for adult book stores — including an age restriction — but anyone can just saunter into a Board of Supervisors or city council meeting and share images of naked people engaged in sex acts, as long as it has some tangential connection to the topic under discussion.

If that’s OK, then where will it stop?

Is obscenity allowed? It’s complicated

While the First Amendment does protect hate speech — including antisemitic, racist and homophobic comments — obscene speech is more of a gray area.

“As long as the speech does not result in an actual disruption or constitute ‘obscenity,’ which the U.S. Supreme Court has narrowly defined, speech like this can still be considered protected speech,” Neal said in an email sent after the meeting.

The law firm of Richards Watson Gershon, which advises many California cities on legal matters, offers a similar take in its handbook on state open meeting laws.

“In some circumstances, the use of profanity may serve as a basis for stopping a speaker. It will depend, however, upon what profane words or comments are made and the context of those comments. Therefore, no one should be ruled out of order for profanity unless the language both is truly objectionable and causes a disturbance or disruption in the proceeding.”

So here’s a question: If some people feel so uncomfortable that they choose to leave a meeting — and are, in fact, advised that they should leave or look away if they are offended — isn’t that a disruption? And isn’t that reason enough to intervene?

Another thing: Where in the law does it say that speakers have a right to display sexually explicit videos and pictures at public meetings?

Nowhere.

So let speakers use words to make their case, not graphic images intended to shock and offend the audience which, by the way, not only includes those sitting in the meeting room, but also people watching at home.

Memo to the county: If you’re going to delay posting the meeting video a full day because you needed time to censor the offensive content in hindsight, that’s a pretty good sign you should have acted to stop the display in the first place.

The pure hypocrisy of the stunt itself is also worth noting.

Our community has not seen any such lewd or explicit acts performed at local Pride events. It took narrow-minded haters to bring it here and ambush audience members attending a routine government meeting.

Don’t fall for their misinformation or their shock-and-awe tactics, and we encourage our elected leaders to stand up against this kind of nonsense.

Local government agencies are under no obligation to allow videos to be played during public comment periods, and given what happened on Tuesday, the San Luis Obispo County Board of Supervisors should waste no time in banning them.

At the very least, if the county doesn’t have an understandable policy on just what is acceptable, now is the time to get one.

Case closed.