If your speech is interrupted by disruptions and no quorum is present, you're not being given equal access to the City Council and the community: such behavior violates the Public Meetings Act (the Brown Act), as I pointed out to Rotkin in three e-mails and two phone messages.

Rotkin had a chance to correct this misconduct by allowing me to speak the next night at the Civic without making a fuss. This would have also given him incentive to hold Council members accountable the next time they decided to interrupt a speaker from the public.

Fitzmaurice could have quietly left the room, or he could have spoken afterwards, or he could have gone to the mike to speak at Oral Communications himself in opposition and/or protest. He chose instead to interrupt, create a disturbance, and attempt to invoke a form of heckler's censorship. Rotkin did not call him on this. Nor did he acknowledge the obvious fact that with Councilmembers out of the room, a quorum was not present, and I was no longer able to properly address the Council at all.

I happen to believe that people should be allowed to speak out (calling a racist a racist, if that's what come up). Or walk out. But Fitzmaurice and Rotkin have decided on decorum rules--the only catch is that they don't have to follow them themselves. They simply use them when they please. Which has often been to silence critics.

They have had no problem interrupting, threatening, silencing, ejecting, and even arresting speakers in the past or members of the audience who whisper (much less stand up, comment, and disrupt a speaker at the podium--as Fitzmaurice did).

I am currently in court over one such incident from March 2002 (the so-called "Heil Krohn!" case--discussed elsewhere on this website). Interestingly enough it was Fitzmaurice who provoked this incident as well.

Unless we call officials who abuse their positions of power on their abuses, we cannot hope to prevent them from happening again.

Holding Rotkin's Council accountable, not my great desire to wait in line for two more hours and speak for three minutes, was the point of subjecting myself to Rotkin's harassment, humiliation, and arrest the next night.

While folks may disagree on the wisdom, effectiveness, humorousness, or propriety of "Y Swami Y"'s accent, I hope most readers agree that City Council needs to be held accountable to the same standards as the rest of us. And those standards have to be fair.