California may soon lift a ban on state-funded travel to states with anti-LGBTQ+ laws and instead focus on an advertising campaign to bring anti-discrimination messages to red states.
California started banning official travel to states with laws it deemed discriminatory against LGBTQ+ people in 2017, starting with Kansas, Mississippi, North Carolina and Tennessee. Since then, the list has grown to include a total of 26 states, most of them Republican-led, following a surge of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation these past few years.
The prohibition has prevented elected officials, state workers and university scholars from traveling to more than half of the country using the state’s money. That has posed a significant challenge to sports teams at public colleges and universities, which have had to find alternative funding sources to pay for their road games in states like Arizona and Utah. It has also complicated some of the state’s other policy goals, like using state money to pay for people who live in other states to travel to California for abortions.
California lawmakers in the state Assembly on Monday passed legislation to end the travel ban. The bill, introduced by state Senate leader Toni Atkins, would also establish an outreach and advertising campaign in states on the travel ban list to promote pro-LGBTQ+ messages. Atkins, who is a lesbian, said the travel ban has helped raise awareness about many anti-LGBTQ+ issues, but it has also led to unintended consequences.
THANK YOU. Honestly the amount of taxpayer money our educational institutions spend in actual games is ridiculous. Meanwhile the physics department at my local CalState school had to cancel classes earlier this year due to a heat wave – their building doesn’t have A/C.
Yeah, I was reading through this and saw:
and thought, “wow, that’s really unfortunate”. Then I saw:
and thought “ah, there it is, the real motivation for this”.