Travel bans are dumb and hypocritical

I am subject to a travel ban. No not that one, which is much, much worse. Rather, I fall under the one that, since January 2017, prevents me, other CSU and UC faculty, and all state employees from using public funds to travel to states that California Attorney General Xavier Beccera decides is violating California anti-discrimination law. 

For example, under AB 1887 I would be denied reimbursement for travel to North Carolina to research the effects of its silly public bathroom laws, or to present an argument about how silly they are at an academic conference there. AG Beccera’s list has recently grown to 11. 

Many of these states have been targeted for their attempts to carve out accommodations for private religious groups who are connected in some way with public services and funds. Texas and Oklahoma, for example, do not require child welfare services to place children in same-sex or single parent households if doing so would violate religious or moral convictions or policies central to these groups’ mission statements.

Kansas falls under the travel ban because it doesn’t require student groups at public universities to have an “all-comers” policy for organizational leadership positions. In other words, Kansas is banned for a policy that would have implicated California until pretty recently. It strikes me as an odd deficiency in humility to be so vindictive against Kansas for missing a moral discovery that California state officials have only just made. It took California legislators years and years to finally get this right, but Kansas is held out for official sanction for failing to follow along right away.

(And, just so we’re clear, California doesn’t even actually enforce its all-comers policy anymore and I think for good reason.)

Part of the absurdity of the California ban is how selective and arbitrary it is. South Carolina made Beccera’s list last year for a carve-out for faith-based private child placement agencies like those in Texas and Oklahoma, but California is apparently fine footing the bill for a conference junket to Southeast Asia where, in Singapore and Malaysia, male homosexual sex is simply illegal. 

Also, I could get reimbursed for a work trip to Nebraska, despite their law denying marriage rights to people afflicted with a venereal disease, but not if I attend the Gender Infinity Conference in Houston, Texas this year. 

Iowa is on the no-go list for a recent legal change to prevent Medicaid coverage for gender reassignment surgery. But California legislators apparently take a different approach to the fact that Louisiana has the highest incarceration rate in the country, since my reimbursement request for my trip to the Big Easy last year went through without a hitch. 

Finally, I think it’s odd to reflect on what the ban says about how the state regards the primary value of funding faculty travel for the purpose of research and conference participation. 

I would have thought that the reason California taxpayers are implicated in my travel expenses has something to do with a view about the putatively public goods character of the research and scholarly activities that take me across state lines. Before, I would have considered this view a little optimistic. But now I know California legislators just don’t see it that way at all. It rather seems that all this funding is just a subsidy for conference centers, hotels and restaurants, which legislators want to avoid directing to the bad, undeserving states. (For, surely, they can’t actually think that AB 1887 will actually affect legislative changes there).

In that case, the state should probably just eliminate all travel funding for university employees. That is, if the funding just enriches out-of-state room-and-board service providers, and there’s really no meaningful return to taxpayers, then the expenditures seem illegitimate. If not, though — if something like the optimistic view is right — then colleagues should be able to secure funding to participate in the Annual African American Children and Families Conference in Cedar Falls, Iowa in February (despite Iowa’s addition to the list last May). Hampering colleagues’ research in this way sure seems like a poor way to promote social justice.

Especially if there’s anything to the idea that we learn and influence more effectively through exposure and contact than by drawing lines and keeping separate. The latter strategy tends to lead to increased polarization and, for those with minority positions in conservative states, actually could cut off those who might benefit from national alliance and support. 

These risks aren’t worth what amounts to not much more than legislative moral grandstanding and the opportunity to signal they have the right virtues. 

Kyle Swan
Philosophy Department
Sacramento State