Reference: California’s Growing Cultural Blacklist – WSJ
The woke and virtuous “leaders” of California have taken it upon themselves to bar the use of state funds for government travel to Texas, Florida, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Florida, Montana, North Dakota and West Virginia. Why? Because those states are insufficiently woke and have state laws with which California disagrees. With Texas, for example, it is “because the state’s religious-freedom legislation allows religious foster-care providers to decline to place children with same-sex couples,” which apparently is anathema to the Left Coast politicos. This is despite the fact that the Supreme Court just recently ruled unanimously that such laws are constitutional. “Four of the five states added this week were targeted because of policies on transgender athletes in school sports.” It’s like the First Amendment’s protection for the free exercise of one’s religion doesn’t exist in California.
According to the Wall Street Journal, “[t]he state-funded travel ban has disrupted academic exchange between universities and travel by legislators, though naturally it contains an exemption for California to conduct ‘revenue collection.’ As more states are targeted and impose their own restrictions on California (as Oklahoma already has), the economic and political harm will compound.”
While likely there are work-arounds for some of this, like using grant and other non-government money for such travel, where does it end? Pretty soon California will be banning companies who do business in those states, banning packages originating in those states, banning sports teams from those states, etc. Don’t laugh – remember that knee-jerk Major League Baseball reaction to Georgia voting laws. They moved the game to Colorado. MLB isn’t the government, of course, but the wokeness and virtue-signaling driving these decisions is identical.
Frankly, this is childish and the petty tit-for-tat is not going to do anyone any good in the end. For California, or any state, to be attempting to dictate social policy to other states is the classic double-edged sword precedent that wiser people would think twice about before endorsing.
But despite California thinking it is the big fish in the big pond and can dictate to the rest of us, the fact is to the rest of us California effectively is a foreign country. Not for nothing do some of us fervently wish that the state would just crack off from the rest of the states and subside deep into the Pacific. It is apparently happening over time due to plate tectonics, but nowhere near quick enough to save the rest of us. If California wants to be a sovereign republic, then we vote to let it secede, please!
While the money at stake is pretty minimal, right now anyway, this situation threatens to devolve into woke war between the states. We respectfully suggest that these types of attempted intrusions into other states’ affairs is not consistent with various parts of the U. S. Constitution, not the least of which is the Commerce Clause.