“If the community of scholars can span regimes as diverse as China, India, and Iran, surely it can make room for North Carolina.”

That’s my favorite line from a new Bloomberg piece by Virginia Postrel. In it, she takes California to task for its ill-conceived ban on travel to states with politically incorrect bathroom policies. If you’re as tired as I am of social justice warriors using North Carolina as a scape-goat, you’ll enjoy the whole thing, but here are a few highlights:

It’s now illegal to use California state funds to travel to eight other states: Alabama, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee and Texas. The travel ban, which went into effect Jan. 1 and expanded last month, punishes states with laws that run afoul of California’s anti-discrimination statute covering sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression. …

The travel ban is especially ironic as liberals lament state preemption laws that prevent cities in conservative states from enacting left-wing measures. California is trying to export its policies to places that aren’t even in its jurisdiction. And in many cases the ban punishes the same liberal oases hammered by conservative preemption statutes. It doesn’t matter if your conference is in Charlotte or Austin; California wants nothing to do with it.

The law undercuts the idea that state-funded travel is a benefit for the taxpayers footing the bill. It treats this supposed public good as nothing more than a subsidy for the hotels and restaurants elsewhere in the country. If that’s the case, all state-funded travel beyond those few exceptions should end. If not, University of California oncology researchers should still be able to use state money to attend the annual San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, one of the field’s most important meetings. Hampering breast-cancer research is not LGBT-friendly.

California’s intolerance in the name of tolerance is also selective and ethnocentric. It applies only to U.S. destinations. For many LGBT people around the world, living under Texas or Kansas law would be a great liberation. Forget high-profile offenders like Russia. What about Turkey or Singapore? A consistent policy would even deny travel funds for Poland. If the community of scholars can span regimes as diverse as China, India, and Iran, surely it can make room for North Carolina.

Most corrosive is the ban’s assumption that separatism rather than interaction is the best way to encourage tolerance. “The law is a juvenile but well-intended reaction to a real problem,” Mark Rivera, a UC-Davis senior denied funding to travel to a Tennessee research conference, told the Los Angeles Times. “Instead of discouraging travel to supposedly backward places, we should encourage travel; otherwise, campuses will become more insular and make the problem worse.”