‘Right to Rock Act’ booked for Senate debut

The Senate Commerce and Tourism committee on Tuesday is the first stop for a bill that abridges the rights of those who control the programming for public venues.

If you book an act, you won’t have the right to cancel a gig if your grounds for doing so are ideological or belief based, according to Sen. Jonathan Martin’s “Right to Rock Act” (SB 1206).

“The owner or operator of a public venue may not cancel a live performance of an artist, a performer, or a musical group because of the artist’s, performer’s, or musical group’s lawful exercise of freedom of speech or the artist’s, performer’s, or musical group members’ personal beliefs,” reads the filing.

Public venues could be “owned by or rented to a governmental entity, school, college, or university,” per the bill, if these are “funded by or constructed with public or government funds.”

Martin’s bill is the Senate version of one filed in the House by Rep. Joel Rudman, whose version has not been heard in any committee yet. Its first stop, should it ever be heard, would be the Regulatory Reform & Economic Development Subcommittee, which did not include it on its Feb. 6 agenda.

Rudman, who performs in a band, vented about how “liberals” sought to censor him via the unlikely mechanism of Eventbrite signups last year, as WFLA noted.

“When I announced my concert tour, I used Eventbrite to process free tickets so I could get a rough headcount for each gig. The woke mob liberals flooded the system with fake emails and bogus names, so now we have no way of knowing how many to expect.”