Back in 2016, the city of San Francisco passed a law enacting a “boycott” against states that attempted to place legislative restrictions on gay marriage. That meant no municipally funded travel to those states, no contracts with them, or anything else. They would later go on to include states with limits on abortions, trans procedures, a lack of early voting, and anything else deemed to be conservative in nature. But so many states continued to pass “unacceptable laws” that the city was eventually “boycotting” well over half of the nation (30 states). But this week, the City Council repealed the law in its entirety, ending all of the boycotts. So why the sudden change of heart? As with most things, it all came down to the money. (San Francisco Chronicle)

Supervisors rolled back the entire law in a 7-4 vote just one month after the board agreed to exempt construction contracts from the boycott. Mayor London Breed has already said she supports repealing or reforming the underlying law.

“It’s not achieving the goal we want to achieve,” said Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, who sponsored the legislation that repealed the whole boycott. “It is making our government less efficient.”

The boycott law was originally passed by supervisors in 2016 and at first applied only to states that had restricted LGBTQ rights after the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision legalizing same-sex marriage across the country.

The Supervisors are couching this decision by saying the boycotts were “inefficient” or “ineffective.” But the reality was that they simply didn’t work. The city was cutting off its own nose to spite its face. All of the states on the list have a huge list of other states and cities where they can do business. What did San Francisco have to offer that they couldn’t get elsewhere?

Further, as the board was willing to admit, the boycotts were beyond ineffective. Not a single state on the list went on to change its laws after the boycotts were imposed. In fact, some of them continued to toughen their laws. The boycotts also made all of the city’s own contractual work more expensive and less efficient. With so few “approved” states to choose from, bidding was far less competitive.

The boycotts were never anything more than virtue signaling by the Democrats in San Francisco. And in the background, they were undermining the boycotts themselves on a regular basis. As the Chronicle goes on to point out, the city was granting exemptions to the law all the time. They gave out 538 waivers for contracts worth $791 million in 2021 and last year.

“We haven’t changed a single law. We have made competitive bidding less competitive,” said Supervisor Matt Dorsey. “I think San Franciscans would be angry if they knew the amount of hoops that have to be jumped through and the added cost to city contracting.”

So now the boycotts are over and everyone is free to do business with San Francisco if they wish. (Though I’m not sure you’d want to.) And city officials can travel using municipal funds wherever they like. Ain’t democracy grand?