San Francisco has a reputation for being about as far left as a city can go and still being American. The city and its leaders are so reliably leftist that they make the rest of the state of California look like amateurs — and that’s saying a lot.
Another thing San Francisco is famous for is for stomping its feet and pouting at states that aren’t as woke as it is. Beginning in 2016, the city government put into effect Chapter 12X of the Administrative Code. This piece of executive fiat sounds worse than its wonky-sounding title would suggest; it “prohibits city-funded travel and City contracts involving states with certain anti-LGBT laws.”
The initial version of Chapter 12X knocked 17 states out of contention for city business because they don’t sufficiently kowtow to the LGBT lobby.
Three years later, San Francisco amended Chapter 12X to ban “city-funded travel and City contracts involving states with laws that prohibit abortion prior to the viability of the fetus,” adding another seven states to the list of banned locations for not being down with baby-killing.
If you’re counting on me to do the math, that’s 24 states that San Francisco wouldn’t do business with as of 2019. But they weren’t done.
Last year, the city added more bans to Chapter 12X, forbidding “city-funded travel and City contracts involving states with voter suppression laws.”
As of the writing of this article, the city government of San Francisco bans official travel to and business with 28 states for not being sufficiently woke — over half the country. Some states like Pennsylvania and Tennessee only make the list once, while others like Georgia and West Virginia have two strikes against them. A handful of states — Alabama, Florida, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Texas — are three-time offenders.
San Francisco is awfully judgy for a city where homeless people poop in the streets all the time.
Related: Wokeism Is a Religion Without Grace
Reliable leftists in the city note that Chapter 12X was well-intentioned from the outset, but they also admit that the Board of Supervisors might have allowed the bans to get out of hand. After all, the cost of living in San Francisco is already high, and limiting the states with which the city can do business doesn’t help.
“As a result of this vast boycott, San Francisco is constraining the number of businesses it can ink deals with, which all but certainly inhibits quality and drives up costs,” writes Joe Eskenazi at Mission Local. “It also adds onerous time constraints to the contracting process, which leads to poor outcomes and also drives up costs.”
City Administrator Carmen Chu has pointed out that the city’s ban has driven up the costs of doing business as a municipality.
“It limits our ability to procure products and receive services and contract services we need to run,” she noted. “It limits competition for our work.”
Chu’s March 4 memo to city officials spells out which states offend on what grounds.
“Subject to certain exceptions, Chapter 12X prohibits the City from funding travel to states on the Covered State List,” the memo reads. “Chapter 12X also provides that the City shall not enter into any Contract with a Contractor (A) that has its United States headquarters in a state on the Covered State list; or (B) where any or all of the work on the Contract will be performed in a state on the Covered State List.”
What’s funny about the prohibition list and the rationale behind it is that those who question it aren’t decrying the fact that San Francisco clenches its fists and pitches a fit when a state doesn’t bend to its woke will.
“San Francisco may or may not be 49 square miles surrounded by reality (not quite 47 square miles, really), but the reality outside our borders is definitely getting worse,” Eskenazi writes.
You see, the problem isn’t that San Francisco is too woke; it’s that the rest of the world doesn’t sufficiently follow the woke paradigm. Because of this, Eskenenazi wonders if more bans could come.
“So, there’s no reason to think Administrative Code 12X couldn’t be appended to include states engaging in aggressive immigration policies or incarcerating low-level drug offenders or any number of schemes that have successfully made the leap from talk radio to statehouses nationwide,” he points out, somewhat tongue-in-cheek. “There are still 21 more states to boycott, after all.”
Eskenazi thinks that the only way to bend the rest of the country to the will of the wokes is for other cities to join San Francisco in banning everybody, and Chu has admitted that no other city wants to enact similar bans.
It’s also interesting to note that the city doesn’t measure the effects of their ban, so there’s no easy way to measure the economic impact of policies like these. But we can say one thing with confidence: the states that have exhibited care for the unborn, a concern for election integrity, or an unwillingness to allow the transgender movement to roll over the lives of everyday Americans care more about their own citizens than they do about what San Francisco thinks of them.
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