Why California Banned State-Funded Travel to Florida and Elsewhere

Good morning.

California will ban state-funded travel to Arkansas, Florida, Montana, North Dakota and West Virginia in response to anti-L.G.B.T.Q. legislation in those places, officials announced on Monday.

“There has been a coordinated attack on fundamental civil rights,” Rob Bonta, California’s attorney general, said at a news conference. “It’s about aligning our dollars with our values.”

There are now 17 states under California’s ban, including Texas, Tennessee, and North and South Carolina.

The law, approved by the State Legislature in 2016, requires California to add states to the list if they enact laws that discriminate against or remove protections for people on the basis of sex, gender identity or sexual orientation. It was enacted amid a backlash against states where lawmakers were trying to pass “bathroom bills” to prevent transgender people from using restrooms that aligned with their gender identity.

Bonta, a progressive ally of Gov. Gavin Newsom, said that “a wave of discriminatory new bills” was sweeping across the country and that he was required to take action.

Evan Low, a California lawmaker who wrote the ban, said it was meant to keep state workers safe and out of situations where they might be discriminated against.

“The current culture war is not a game,” he said.

In 2017, Low acknowledged that banning state-funded travel to Texas was largely symbolic. Still, he said this week that he hoped California’s moves would prompt big businesses to follow suit.

Officials didn’t say how much money the state had withheld as a result of the ban, and the attorney general’s office said it didn’t track anything related to the law beyond the list of states.

But Richard C. Auxier, a researcher at the Tax Policy Center, said that while the amount might be relatively small, the effects could snowball.

He cited North Carolina’s “bathroom bill,” which prompted a national outcry after it was enacted in 2016. In addition to travel bans like California’s, the N.C.A.A. and the N.B.A. moved tournaments in protest, and performers refused to play gigs there. The law was repealed, and the state’s Republican governor was ousted in part because of frustration over the economic fallout.

The question is how much state lawmakers respond to economic pain felt by local businesses and governments as they try to coax back visitors lost during the pandemic.

“These cities are all dying for people to come back — to go to the bars, to go to events,” Auxier said, so if other organizations take their cues from California, local tourism groups or businesses could be hurt enough to prompt them to push back against their leaders.

“‘Will it work?’ is a giant political question,” he said.

Ryland Whittington, a 13-year-old from San Diego whom officials invited to speak at Monday’s news conference, said that the ability to feel safe, play sports and get any care he needed wasn’t political, in no small part because of where he lives.

“Being trans is just a small part of who I am,” he said. “I know I’m lucky to live in California.”

He asked lawmakers to “give all kids the opportunity to be happy, healthy and to live their lives in freedom and peace.”

For more:

• Read this story from 2017 about when California announced its ban on state-funded travel to Texas.

• Get to know Bonta and his priorities.

• See the full list of states where state-funded travel is banned and read about exceptions to the ban from the attorney general’s office.

• CalMatters has a list of five things you should know about the state’s final (for now) record-busting budget deal.

• One of the biggest barriers to mass immunity in the U.S. is persuading skeptical young adults to get the coronavirus vaccine.

• Some 4,000 nonviolent federal offenders who were sent home early in the pandemic to help slow the spread of the coronavirus could be forced to return to prison.

• State Democrats want the option to speed up the recall election to take advantage of what they see as favorable conditions for Newsom, The Associated Press reports.

• A federal court threw out the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust complaint against Facebook, a major setback to the government’s push to break up the social media giant.

• A new report found that California’s white and Black populations are declining, while its Asian and Hispanic populations continue to grow, The San Francisco Chronicle reports.

• At least eight homeless people died while they were living at the Airtel Plaza Hotel, one of the hotels used in Project Roomkey, The Los Angeles Times reports.

• Teviston, a community in the Central Valley, is without running water during a heat wave, CalMatters reports.

• Many “hotshot” firefighters who battled the state’s wildfires last year are quitting, The Mercury News reports.

• There’s only one drug designed to treat postpartum depression. KQED asks: “Why does Kaiser Permanente make it so hard to get?”

• Californians are fueling Austin’s housing boom, The San Francisco Chronicle reports.

• A visit to Nobu in Malibu, writes Tejal Rao, The Times’s California restaurant critic, “should seem predictable and dated and maybe even mildly embarrassing, like coming across an old photo of yourself in a dress over bedazzled jeans. But somehow — and this is a part of Nobu Malibu’s magic — it doesn’t.”

• Real estate: What $730,000 gets you in California.

And finally …

This year, across California, the biggest Pride parades were canceled because of the pandemic. But thousands of L.G.B.T.Q. Californians have still celebrated in ways large and small.

Just this past weekend, hundreds of revelers descended on Dolores Park in San Francisco.

And in Los Angeles, Boyle Heights hosted its inaugural Orgullo Fest, which organizers said they hoped would become a home for the city’s Latinx L.G.B.T.Q. community.