Back in 2016, California passed a new law (Assembly Bill 1887) establishing a naughty list of states that don’t conform to their high moral standards. The bill created a travel ban, forbidding state-funded or endorsed travel to states that failed to provide “protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression.” They quickly began adding states to the list, including Texas, Oklahoma, Mississippi and Kentucky. (Clever readers are probably noticing a pattern already.)

This week, California’s woke Attorney General, Xavier Becerra, broke out his sharpie and added another name to the list. This time it was Iowa, selected for failing to have Medicaid pay for transgender surgical procedures. (Sacramento Bee)

Attorney General Xavier Becerra on Friday extended California’s ban on taxpayer-funded trips to an 11th state, adding Iowa to the list based on the Midwestern state’s passage of a law that removed gender protections under Medicaid.

Becerra’s order means public employees and college students may not travel to Iowa under provisions of a 2016 California law.

Twelve years ago, Iowa’s Legislature made gender identity a protected characteristic under its Civil Rights Act, which prohibited refusing service to or discriminating against people based on their gender identity preferences.

Iowa had previously passed muster in California’s eyes because of their state Civil Rights Act. But this spring, the state Supreme Court ruled that the law had to be applied to transgender surgery paid for by Medicaid. That didn’t sit well with the locals and Iowa’s governor quickly signed a bill barring the use of Medicaid funds for such procedures. That led to California’s decision this week.

Obviously this is a state-level matter and both Iowa and California can do as they wish. But the question of taxpayer-funded medical procedures is a valid one to consider. What was Iowa really doing when they modified that law?

One way to look at this is to consider what was supposed to be one of the foundational, guiding principles in the medical field. Primum non nocere, or “first, do no harm.” California obviously feels that Iowa’s decision was discriminatory, but that requires you to accept the belief men can actually be women and vice versa. If you hold to the scientifically established fact that there are only two genders, each required for the propagation of the species, then so-called “transition” surgery is nothing more than the permanent mutilation of an otherwise perfectly healthy body.

Is that something the taxpayers should be on the hook for? Clearly, their elected officials didn’t think so. And now California is sitting in judgment over them and banning official travel to that state, along with quite a few others.

Of course, that California law is something of a joke to start with. It’s only enforced when politically convenient to show how woke they are. They still allow the college athletic teams to travel to “banned” states when there are major bowl games and tournaments to attend. It’s all brushed aside as a sort of prosecutorial discretion. We’ll enforce the law when we feel like it, suckers.