Certain ideas get caught in the collective public consciousness. Take for instance, the now familiar meme of the typical Walmart shopper, captured online at the “People of Walmart” site. Or get lost in the delirium of a quick Google search of “Florida man…” to find any host of strange but true stories of, well, Florida being Florida.
But it wasn’t the story of a Florida man chewing off another man’s face, or a Florida man being trapped in an unlocked closet for two days, or a Florida man being killed by an alligator while hiding from cops (I could go on like this for hours, honestly), no it was none of these that finally pushed the state of California from instituting an official travel ban of state business to Florida.
Last week the chairman of the California Assembly’s LGBT caucus, Rep. Evan Low (D-Campbell), helped implement a statewide ban of all taxpayer funded travel to five states that recently adopted anti-transgender laws. In total there are now seventeen states (mostly in the Southeast, but also Montana, Idaho, Iowa and South Dakota) which are on the official state of California “No Fly” list.
As we celebrate #Pride2021 here in California, other states are launching dangerous attacks on the #LGBTQ community. We cannot stay silent in the face of these discriminatory state laws by funding travel with CA taxpayer $.
🙏 @AGRobBonta 🙏 for your solidarity & leadership! pic.twitter.com/98MlIIEKES
— Evan Low (@Evan_Low) June 28, 2021
As the wave of so-called “bathroom bills” and other restrictive measures are made into laws in Republican states, states like California are putting their money where their mouth is to fight back in support of LGBTQ rights.
When asked by the Sacramento Bee about this largely symbolic act, Mr. Low said that California was “following what the private sector has already stated and what they’ve done. Apple, Facebook, Google, Nike, United Airlines, Coca Cola, all of these major corporations are saying the same thing: that we will not expand, nor will we host conferences, and that has actually had an impact to their pocketbooks. You saw significant change, they’ve actually backtracked and said, ‘Okay, we’re going to withdraw that legislation.’ So that works, and that’s the beauty of what we’re hoping to create.”
“This post is solely the opinion of this contributing writer and may not reflect the opinion of other writers, staff, or owners of Instinct Magazine.”
Sources: Sacramento Bee,
