In his latest SeeThru post, Cato Institute’s Neal McCluskey writes about an amazing decree from the president of San Francisco State that forbids any employee or student from using any school funds for travel to Indiana.

The background to this is by now well-known. Indiana recently passed a law that is intended to shield citizens against lawsuits if they decline to accept business orders for things they have religious objections to. Presently, that means same-sex weddings. People who didn’t want to bake cakes or provide flowers for such ceremonies have been taken to court and successfully sued for damages. Inevitably, given our current political climate, this has given rise to red hot denunciations that the state is approving discrimination.

Denunciation wasn’t enough for SFSU president Leslie Wong, however. She wants to punish “Indiana” by keeping anyone at her school from going there for any reason, as if that would somehow accomplish anything except to inconvenience SFSU people. Suppose that a SFSU debate team had registered for a tournament at Indiana University. Sorry — you can only go at your own expense. If the team doesn’t go, well, that’ll show Indiana how angry we are about this law!

The gesture is another of those pointless exercises in righteous indignation for which progressives are so well known. It’s even sillier than divesting stocks to “make a point.” But this one has an additional wrinkle: it would appear to be an instance of state government interfering the interstate commerce. The commerce clause in Article I, Section 8 has been stretched to ridiculous lengths, but preventing some people in California from traveling to Indiana looks like the kind of action that truly falls under that section.