Recently, California just passed a law banning state-funded travel to any state that California deems as “anti-LGBTQ.” According to the law, California “would prohibit 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…has enacted a law…..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 or sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression…” This means that any state employee is not allowed to travel to such states for their job or assignment. If they choose to travel to those states, they will pay their own way instead of it being paid for them.
The law continues to describe California as a leader on civil rights and non-discrimination. It states that California’s nondiscrimination laws protect people on the basis of their sexual orientation, gender identity, etc, etc. However, the law also states that religious freedom is no excuse to “discriminate” against the named above.
At first, California banned state-funded travel to Kansas, Mississippi, Tennessee, and North Carolina. Then, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra added Texas, South Dakota, Alabama, and Kentucky to their list. Why? Because those states passed laws allowing individuals to discriminate.
Before we go further, let’s define a word.
Discriminate: to make a distinction in favor of or against a person or thing on the basis of the group, class, or category to which the person or thing belongs rather than according to actual merit; show partiality.
California is proud of their “leadership” on civil rights, especially the civil rights of other ethnic people and people of the LGBTQ+ community. Yet, I have one question: what about the civil rights of everybody else? While they make special room for the LGBTQ+ community, they simultaneously push out other people’s rights. What if I run a business and do not want my bathrooms to be transgender because I want to protect women’s rights? What if a religious person does not wish to cater to LGBTQ+ people because it goes against his conscience? If a religious conviction is no justification for discrimination, what is?
I want to view this as logically as possible. If you make exceptions or protect one people, you automatically discriminate against others. We discriminate against murderers and thieves in order to protect the rights of others. By showing special favor to the LGBTQ+ community, we discriminate against those opposed to LGBTQ+ individuals.
When it comes to the LGBTQ+ community, I see no reason to make special exceptions for them. They are individuals who are no different than you and me (except their beliefs). If a business owner refuses to cater to them, economically, that creates more opportunity for another business owner who will cater to them. We need to let the economic system run the way it’s meant to run without the government interfering. Why does the government need to involve themselves in cultural issues like this?
Of course, there are states who prohibit LGBTQ+ individuals from such things as adoption but that is to protect the right of the child. The child has a right, and statistically, children with two Dads or two Mom’s do not grow up stable. However, that’s different than saying, “We will ban state travel to these states because they are anti-LGBTQ.” Are they anti-LGBTQ? Or are those states just pro-individual rights and liberty?
Let’s talk about religious liberty. A Muslim will discriminate against a Jew’s beliefs, and an atheist will discriminate against a Christian’s beliefs. If an individual discriminates against a gay person, making laws prohibiting that discrimination, in turn, discriminates against the individual. We as individuals have the God-given right to “pursue life, liberty, and happiness” the way we see fit, and that right ought not to be taken away from us.
Obviously, I have my own personal convictions about the LGBTQ+ community, but that is beside the point. When the government steps in to actually ban state-funded travel to other states because of their so-called “anti-LGBTQ” laws, they discriminate against those other states. We have a problem being politically correct. Everybody is worried about discrimination when the fact is while we disallow discrimination against one sect, we are actually discriminating against other individuals’ rights.
LGBTQ+ individuals have God-given rights as much as any other individual, so why do we feel the need to create a special place just for them? Isn’t that, in a way, discriminating against them? We’re separating them from everybody else. As a community, they might voluntarily separate from others, but that’s no reason to create a special place just for them in our laws that separate them from the rest of society.
The government needs to let the economic system and the culture to run the way it’s supposed to run. When the government steps in to solve a cultural, moral, societal problem, it always makes things worse. Instead, we need to let individuals rise up and speak for themselves. The reasons we have so many court cases involving LGBTQ+ individuals is because another individual’s right was violated. Usually, the LGBTQ+ individual wants to force another individual to do business with them, which is discriminating against that particular individual. What should happen is, the LGBTQ+ individual just needs to find another individual with whom to do business. That’s the way economics works, and it ought to work that way.
Perhaps this all seems like it’s going nowhere. The fact is, despite my own personal convictions and beliefs about the LGBTQ+ community, I know that from a logical standpoint, economically and legally, each individual has God-given rights. It is the right of a man to cater or to not cater to an LGBTQ+ or any other individual. It is the right and the duty of the state to protect that right. Our society ought not to be trapped by burdening laws which force individuals to do something either against their preference or their religious beliefs. No matter what an individual’s background is, religiously or culturally, as humans, we have our God-given rights, and it is not the right of the State to take those away or hamper them in any way.
Footnotes:
http://www.cnn.com/2017/06/23/us/california-travel-ban/index.html
https://oag.ca.gov/sites/all/files/agweb/pdfs/ab1887/ab-1887-text.pdf
https://oag.ca.gov/ab1887