65 years after historic bus boycott, Louisana finally bans boycotts — of Israel

The Baton Rouge Bus Boycott which occurred in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 1953, was the first large-scale boycott of a southern segregated bus system. The Baton Rouge Boycott inspired the Montgomery Bus Boycott two years later. [..] The boycott was prompted partly by the 1950 decision by the Baton Rouge city council to support the financially strapped municipal bus company by revoking the licenses of nearly 40 competing black-owned companies.

Today, the Louisiana governor has barred companies expressing opposition to the Israeli government’s Gaza occupation policy from engaging in contracts with the state of Louisiana, becoming the 25th U.S. state to do so.

Then as now, what the State giveth, the State taketh away, so this sort of political correctness masquerading as commercial policy is not exactly new or surprising.

The real curiosity is that twenty-five U.S. states, now including the Democrat governor of a state with a microscopic Jewish population, would be so curiously eager to align their administrations with the territorial ambitions of a foreign government on the other side of the world.

Exactly what articulable public policy objective is being advanced by curtailing freedom of expression in this way? Well, perhaps the objective is not one of public policy, but to respond to a private pressure campaign. The effect, however, is to ensure that company owners that refuse to do business with the state of Israel are also placed at a disadvantage domestically: to be taxed just as heavily but to have fewer commercial opportunities.

If the courts do not curtail this practice (which almost certainly runs counter to the freedom of expression guarantees in state constitutions), one could certainly imagine this anti-boycott ‘tool’ being applied in a variety of ways to force merchants to perform services they would otherwise morally object to.

If it’s acceptable to extort merchants into fulfilling orders from a foreign government and to, say, bake gay wedding cakes, as is presently fashionable, perhaps forcing merchants to support Louisiana’s prison labor regime is a reasonable next step?