Sure, California has great beaches, wine country, and Hollywood stars. But Gov. Gavin Newsom has lately signed some bills into law that make the Golden State look like an authoritarian vampire that sucks the life out of its residents by chilling free speech and making unusual demands about everything from gender quotas to law enforcement attire.
Let’s start with the most recent: A group called Right to Life of Central California, a pro-life organization dedicated to helping women, filed a lawsuit in federal court last week challenging a state law that Newsom signed Oct. 8.
S.B. 742 bans certain free speech activities when a speaker is within 30 feet of another person and that person is “in a public way or on a sidewalk area” and “within 100 feet of the entrance or exit of a vaccination site and is seeking to enter or exit a vaccination site.”
Right to Life is challenging the law because it restricts the group’s ability to offer services to women outside their own building and parking lot, as they are located next to a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic that administers the HPV vaccine. If caught violating S.B. 742, offenders can be slapped with a fine of up to $1,000, up to six months imprisonment in county jail, or both.
The law doesn’t just adversely affect pro-life groups. Even pro-vaccine groups are upset about the 100-foot censorship zone that seems as arbitrary as it is unnecessary. A young pro-vaccine demonstrator has filed a similar lawsuit charging the new law restricts his ability to persuade people to get vaccinated — something California’s politicians, of all people, ardently support.
In other words, the same law that restricts pro-life advocacy also restricts pro-vaccine speech in the same areas. That’s the thing with these kinds of unconstitutional laws: They often hurt all kinds of causes more than they help liberals with their extremism.
I’m not surprised Democrats passed this in the Legislature, but California has already been warned about infringing on free speech rights, particularly when it comes to the issue of abortion. In 2018, the Supreme Court took up a case called the National Institute of Family Life Advocates v. Becerra dealing with the FACT Act, a California law requiring pro-life centers to advertise for abortion organizations when communicating with clients. The high court found that such a law infringed on the organization’s First Amendment rights. In his majority opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas said the law “targets speakers, not speech, and imposes an unduly burdensome disclosure requirement that will chill their protected speech.”
In the last few years, California has passed a number of laws that show its extreme, authoritarian bend, enough to scare expatriates now moving to Arizona and Texas as fast as they can. The laws touch every facet of life, from corporations to law enforcement to where people can speak freely. California politicians just don’t think people can make their own choices.
One law that went into effect in 2019 requires all California-based, publicly owned companies to have at least one woman on the board. By the end of this year, any of those boards with five members or more must also now have at least two women. Another recent California law prohibits law enforcement from wearing uniforms that have camouflage. Yet another law passed in California this year established a task force to study the history of slavery in the United States. These are just a few examples of laws that showcase how liberal California has become and how much local politicians think the state should decide what people there do.
These laws are bothersome, and the laws that chill free speech are no better. In fact, they might be the worst because they’re covert yet still effective. Let’s hope that like the FACT Act before it, S.B. 742 is also found to be unconstitutional. By the looks of it, free speech might be the only thing Californians have left in the future, and they might not even have that.
Nicole Russell is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is a journalist in Washington, D.C., who previously worked in Republican politics in Minnesota. She was the 2010 recipient of the American Spectator’s Young Journalist Award.
