If you listen to California Gov. Gavin Newsom, you might get the impression that the Taliban had just swept Texas and is marching on New Orleans. “Extremist Republicans are systematically attacking the very foundations of our free society—denying women equality, attacking communities of color, fetishizing weapons of war, banning books, restricting speech, and undermining the right to vote,” Mr. Newsom tweeted March 30.
The potential presidential hopeful earlier this month kicked off a “Campaign for Democracy” to spread a woke message to the oppressed and benighted Americans living in red states such as Alabama, Arkansas and Mississippi. The irony is that California law bans state-funded travel to 23 states because they’ve adopted policies that lawmakers in Sacramento claim are discriminatory.
Mr. Newsom’s spokesperson said no paid state staff attended his trip—a decision that seems to have heightened the contradiction, to borrow a Marxist trope, of his state’s travel ban. Progressives in California sought to ostracize red states whose democratically elected leaders implemented policies that offend their woke sensibilities. Yet the restriction has punished Californians more than anyone else, to the point that the state’s Democrats are now pushing to repeal it.
“While the law originally sent a clear, early and effective message that California would not engage with states that allow discrimination against LGBTQ+ people, a new approach is needed for California to have a positive impact,” state Senate President Pro Tempore Toni Atkins’s office noted in a March 29 statement announcing a bill to roll back the ban.
Democrats enacted the travel ban in 2016 with the goal of forcing GOP states to adopt California’s woke policies on matters such as transgender bathrooms. The opposite has happened. An increasing number of states have since passed laws to curb the encroachment of woke culture into schools and to protect freedom of conscience.
California’s travel ban began with only four states—Kansas, Mississippi, North Carolina and Tennessee. The Golden State added Alabama in 2017 after it passed a law permitting religious child-placement agencies to exclude same-sex couples from their adoption and foster-care programs.
Iowa was blacklisted in 2019 because it wouldn’t provide Medicaid coverage for gender-reassignment surgery. Idaho was boycotted in 2020 because it prohibited male transgender athletes from competing in women’s sports. Ditto West Virginia and Indiana. Arizona landed on the list last year after it barred gender-transition procedures for minors.
Seven years in, the ban not only hasn’t accomplished Democrats’ goals; it has resulted in a host of unintended consequences. For one, professors at public universities complain they can’t travel to academic conferences.
“As a UC professor who studies LGBTQ youth in the Inland Empire and South Texas, the travel ban has impacted my ability to conduct research in Texas and to travel there, and other states, to present the important findings from this research,” Brandon Andrew Robinson, a professor of gender and sexuality studies at the University of California, Riverside, complained. His findings include an article “Non-Binary Embodiment, Queer Knowledge Production, and Disrupting the Cisnormative Field: Notes from a Trans Ethnographer.” Red states may start lobbying to keep California’s travel ban.
In addition to irking academics, the travel ban harms student athletes at public universities. The San Diego State men’s basketball team was able to play in the Final Four of the March Madness tournament in Houston only because the National Collegiate Athletics Association agreed to pay for the players’ travel.
But the University of California, Los Angeles, next summer will join the Big 10 sports conference, which includes four schools from blacklisted states. The UCLA football and men’s basketball teams might be able to fund travel with ticket and TV broadcasting revenue, but its women’s swim and tennis teams won’t.
Democrats have also discovered that their ban limits the state’s ability to fund abortions for women in states with restrictive laws. “One thing we discovered was that while we could pay for people’s plane tickets to California, we couldn’t pay for their tickets to go home because of the travel ban,” Ms. Atkins explained.
In lieu of the travel ban, she is proposing to establish a new taxpayer-funded program to “promote social equity, civil rights, and antidiscrimination through marketing and advertising” in red states that would be overseen by the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development. This way Mr. Newsom can finance his red-state campaign with state taxpayer dollars.
This left-wing marketing campaign is by definition cultural imperialism—though progressives would wince at being accused of having a colonialist mind-set. The irony that seems lost on Mr. Newsom and his fellow Democrats is that many red-state refugees fled California and other liberal bastions in search of freedom.
Thriving democracies don’t lose people to authoritarian states. It’s the other way around.
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The potential presidential hopeful earlier this month kicked off a “Campaign for Democracy” to spread a woke message to the oppressed and benighted Americans living in red states such as Alabama, Arkansas and Mississippi. The irony is that California law bans state-funded travel to 23 states because they’ve adopted policies that lawmakers in Sacramento claim are discriminatory.
Mr. Newsom’s spokesperson said no paid state staff attended his trip—a decision that seems to have heightened the contradiction, to borrow a Marxist trope, of his state’s travel ban. Progressives in California sought to ostracize red states whose democratically elected leaders implemented policies that offend their woke sensibilities. Yet the restriction has punished Californians more than anyone else, to the point that the state’s Democrats are now pushing to repeal it.
“While the law originally sent a clear, early and effective message that California would not engage with states that allow discrimination against LGBTQ+ people, a new approach is needed for California to have a positive impact,” state Senate President Pro Tempore Toni Atkins’s office noted in a March 29 statement announcing a bill to roll back the ban.
Democrats enacted the travel ban in 2016 with the goal of forcing GOP states to adopt California’s woke policies on matters such as transgender bathrooms. The opposite has happened. An increasing number of states have since passed laws to curb the encroachment of woke culture into schools and to protect freedom of conscience.
California’s travel ban began with only four states—Kansas, Mississippi, North Carolina and Tennessee. The Golden State added Alabama in 2017 after it passed a law permitting religious child-placement agencies to exclude same-sex couples from their adoption and foster-care programs.
Iowa was blacklisted in 2019 because it wouldn’t provide Medicaid coverage for gender-reassignment surgery. Idaho was boycotted in 2020 because it prohibited male transgender athletes from competing in women’s sports. Ditto West Virginia and Indiana. Arizona landed on the list last year after it barred gender-transition procedures for minors.
Seven years in, the ban not only hasn’t accomplished Democrats’ goals; it has resulted in a host of unintended consequences. For one, professors at public universities complain they can’t travel to academic conferences.
“As a UC professor who studies LGBTQ youth in the Inland Empire and South Texas, the travel ban has impacted my ability to conduct research in Texas and to travel there, and other states, to present the important findings from this research,” Brandon Andrew Robinson, a professor of gender and sexuality studies at the University of California, Riverside, complained. His findings include an article “Non-Binary Embodiment, Queer Knowledge Production, and Disrupting the Cisnormative Field: Notes from a Trans Ethnographer.” Red states may start lobbying to keep California’s travel ban.
In addition to irking academics, the travel ban harms student athletes at public universities. The San Diego State men’s basketball team was able to play in the Final Four of the March Madness tournament in Houston only because the National Collegiate Athletics Association agreed to pay for the players’ travel.
But the University of California, Los Angeles, next summer will join the Big 10 sports conference, which includes four schools from blacklisted states. The UCLA football and men’s basketball teams might be able to fund travel with ticket and TV broadcasting revenue, but its women’s swim and tennis teams won’t.
Democrats have also discovered that their ban limits the state’s ability to fund abortions for women in states with restrictive laws. “One thing we discovered was that while we could pay for people’s plane tickets to California, we couldn’t pay for their tickets to go home because of the travel ban,” Ms. Atkins explained.
In lieu of the travel ban, she is proposing to establish a new taxpayer-funded program to “promote social equity, civil rights, and antidiscrimination through marketing and advertising” in red states that would be overseen by the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development. This way Mr. Newsom can finance his red-state campaign with state taxpayer dollars.
This left-wing marketing campaign is by definition cultural imperialism—though progressives would wince at being accused of having a colonialist mind-set. The irony that seems lost on Mr. Newsom and his fellow Democrats is that many red-state refugees fled California and other liberal bastions in search of freedom.
Thriving democracies don’t lose people to authoritarian states. It’s the other way around.
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