"A wee bit hypocritical?"

Bookworm writes about the abuse of gays in the seven countries from which President Trump sought a temporary travel ban. California opposed the president's actions. Now California has instituted a travel ban on state-funded and state-sponsored travel to states in America that do not have laws to California's liking on LGBTQ issues.

In June 2017, California announced that it was banning all travel to states that it identifies as having policies discriminating in any way against LGBTQer conduct. This list currently includes Texas, Alabama, Kentucky, South Dakota, Kansas, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Tennessee. Each of those named states has passed one or more laws holding that First Amendment religious liberty and freedom of association means that people whose faith disapproves of homosexual conduct cannot be forced to provide personal services for LGBTQ weddings, provide adoption services to LGBTQ couples, and share bathrooms with individuals who claim to be transgendered.

It is important to note that in none of those states are there official or unofficial policies calling for the physical abuse, imprisonment, or execution of people on the LGBTQ etc. spectrum. None of these states have laws preventing people in the LGBTQers from marrying or adopting children. Nevertheless, even as California extends an unlimited, un-vetted welcome to people coming from countries in which the law and the culture actively attack, imprison, and murder LGBTQers, it cannot bear to be in the same country as states that honor everyone’s First Amendment freedoms.

Is it just me or is California being a wee bit hypocritical here? Even worse than hypocrisy, it’s practicing a dangerous form of “soft” secession that would justify firing shots, just as Lincoln did against the South:

As we noted when California inaugurated this policy, American federalism is based on the agreement that different states can pursue different policies (within Constitutional bounds) while retaining equal status within the union. California’s decision to escalate the culture war with “sanctions” against states with different political orientations represents a direct challenge to America’s federal structure.

This new order could have a major symbolic impact—for example, by making it difficult or impossible for University of California sports teams to compete against the University of Texas. And could lead to retaliatory measures by the targeted red states: They could, for example, up the ante not only by enacting reciprocal travel bans but also by refusing to cooperate with California’s government in criminal investigations, declining to share tax data, or prohibiting companies from selling products to California’s state government. How long before a coalition of liberal states begins to collectively and systematically impose sanctions on conservative ones, or vice versa?

To say that Democrats don’t play well with others is an understatement. What’s worrisome is when this immature playground behavior extends to matters of core constitutionalism.

Read more here.