California: How to paint yourself into a corner

AB 1887 became law in California on January 1.  This bill prohibits a state agency and the Legislature from requiring any of its employees, officers, or members to travel to, or approving a request for state-funded or state-sponsored travel to, any state that, after June 26, 2015, has enacted a law that voids or repeals, or has the effect of voiding or repealing, existing state or local protections against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression or has enacted a law that authorizes or requires discrimination against same-sex couples or their families or on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression, as specified, subject to certain exceptions. The bill would require the Attorney General to develop, maintain, and post on his or her Internet Web site a current list of states that, after June 26, 2015, have enacted such a law. The bill would make it the responsibility of specified state entities to consult the list in order to comply with the travel and funding restrictions imposed by the bill.

California has started a list of states that it is going to break relationships with including Kansas, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Kentucky, South Dakota, and Kentucky. Officials are now looking into the statutes of the remaining 41 states hoping to uncover transgressions that would add additional states to the list.

And so now we see ‘leadership’ by California state officials to:

1. Force other states to follow their lead by closing relationships with the big and progressive state of California.
2. Boycott other states from doing business with the state of California.
3. They are closing their embassies, so to speak, in assailing the sovereignty of other states who want to have their own laws, priorities and sense of statehood.

See: http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=201520160AB1887

The presumption is that other states want to be like California with its impossible debt load, sanctuary weirdness and fiscal insanity. This bold move to establish ‘leadership’ smacks of organizing the deck chairs on the Titanic while the band plays on.

What Californians might want to consider is that this bold move positions their state in opposition to the Constitution of the United States and the structure of state sovereignty over their own affairs and it ignores the Constitutional presumption of where personal rights and liberties come from. I remember reading somewhere that ‘we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights.’ This in effect prohibits any state, including California from determining anything concerning individual human rights.

Hay California, you do not determine what rights exist and who will exercise them. I know! I know! You have long since given up on the existence of anything remotely resembling moral absolutes and have firmly entrenched the once great State of CA in Nihilistic grandeur. Yes, I know, God is dead or at least unemployed. The state now grants rights, and prescribes the limitations of freedoms.

So, while Governor Brown and his entourage of 100 plus officials travels to China (2013) to set up a trade mission in Shanghai, and travels to Paris to affirm your commitment to the Climate Accord and rub elbows with the likes of:

Afghanistan, Algeria, China, Cyprus, Iran (Islamic Republic of), Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, Mongolia, Montenegro, Oman, Pakistan, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Tunisia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, and Viet Nam.

Tell me Jerry Brown, which of those nations stands out as bastions of California’s version of civil rights and politically correct dealings with their people? Tell me why they deserve closer relationships than Texas, Kansas and South Dakota?

I suppose state funded institutions like USC and UCLA will have to cancel their participation in sporting events outside of California borders.

Yep, I think you just painted yourself into a corner and have chosen to brand as your enemy, some pretty good people and their God. Please stand a little further away from me Jerry. I think you may have ignited a lightning storm. I’d rather not be too close.