U.S. Supreme Court turns away challenge on California LGBTQ travel ban policy

WASHINGTON – The U.S. Supreme Court Monday refused to take up a case brought by Texas over a California state-government ban on travel to states that actively discriminate against LGBTQ people.

In a ‘Bill of Complaint’ lawsuit filed in February of 2020, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, on behalf of his state, filed suit at the Supreme Court against the state of California, alleging that a travel ban by California’s government preventing travel by its workers on state business to Texas is unconstitutional.

California’s legislators passed its travel ban in 2016 after North Carolina enacted an anti-trans law that required people to use gender-specific bathrooms according to their sex at birth.

Texas was added after its Republican Governor Greg Abbott signed HB 3859 into law on June 15, 2017. HB 3859, allows foster care agencies to discriminate against children in foster care and potentially disqualify LGBT families from the state’s foster and adoption system.

At the time, then California Attorney General Xavier Becerra noted; “While the California DOJ works to protect the rights of all our people, discriminatory laws in any part of our country send all of us several steps back. That’s why when California said we would not tolerate discrimination against LGBTQ members of our community, we meant it.”

Becerra also had announced that California will prohibit state-funded and state-sponsored travel to Alabama, Kentucky, South Dakota in addition to Texas.

The former Trump administration had argued for the high court to take up the case, maintaining that the California law “transgresses constitutional principles that are designed to bind the states together in a single union.”

Conservative U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justices, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, said they would have heard the case.