Letters for May 4, 2017
RSCVA and public property
About 200 people—not 100 as Channel 8 reported—and I stood in a long line the morning of April 17 outside the Reno Convention Center before word finally came that they were letting no one else in because Sen. Heller hadn’t booked a large enough room for the town hall.
An impromptu town hall then took place outside the Center front door right in front of a temporary Reno Sparks Convention and Visitors Authority sign warning people that signs and free speech activities were not allowed on this Washoe County property. Dozens of speakers took their turn standing on a rock—a traffic barrier—to express their opinions. An RSCVA representative came out and handed out leaflets explaining that free speech was banned by the RSCVA on its leased property. However, there are no permanent signs on the building conveying this message, and they refused to enforce their own rules.
There were at least a half dozen Reno police officers present. When I asked the police why they were not going to enforce the RSCVA regulation, they said they would do nothing until RSCVA filed a trespass complaint. Obviously the RSCVA rule is arbitrary/or only enforced against people with whom the RSCVA or their customers disagree. I was arrested five months ago at the Convention Center for trespassing after holding up an anti-Tump sign, but the RSCVA refused to come to the bench trial to testify.
The RSCVA is funded in part by room taxes, and its meetings are subject to open meeting laws. They may be a quasi-private organization, but they have no right to arbitrarily restrict signs, flags, T-shirts, lapel pins or anything else that demonstrates free speech on public property. Could we have a short investigative piece on this action?
Ronald Schoenherr
Reno
The sex trade
Re “Getting some” (letters, April 13):
Chris Rosamond writes, “most men don’t have to pay” [for sex]. Most people don’t need wheelchairs—perhaps Chris Rosamond feels superior to those that do. There are many reasons why one would want to engage nurturance for hire—being abused by one’s parents so one cannot engage others socially, being through the emotional wringer of multiple divorces, having a job like truck driving where one doesn’t have time for a relationship, being physically crippled and feeling undesirable, being a bisexual woman in a relationship with a man and needing one’s other desires fulfilled without any emotional strings attached.
The vast majority of sex workers’ customers do, in fact, consider women to be human beings, which is why they are willing to pay. People who take and don’t pay are rapists. The whole trope of “bought like a piece of meat” is a lie from the prohibitionists.
When one engages a plumber by-the-hour or by-the-job, nobody says anything about buying bodies. Why the hysteria about sex work? Because it serves the moral entrepreneurs behind the fake news and panic. N.b., before 1910, prostitution was legal in every state in America. How’d the alcohol prohibition thing from 1920 work out? How’s the drug prohibition thing working? So sex work prohibition will work, you think?
Gary Owens
Reno
Letter to DT
I pay federal taxes because I am an American happy with the services my government provides. The taxes I pay are for the services I want and appreciate, though there are some that I don’t know and may never know.
Nonetheless, I don’t appreciate wasteful spending such as your irrelevant weekend travel to Florida. The spending of tax dollars to shuttle your office, family and administration to Florida every weekend for the past few months so far this year will far and exceed any expenditure for personal travel in any previous administration! Stop it! Stay home, take care of business in a presidential manner, in our White House that we allow you to use at our expense. Your personal, weekend travel is annoying, irrelevant and is wasting federal tax dollars, not to speak of the Florida local government taxes that provide you and all with needless security. Go home and stay there!
Press Clewe
Reno