The San Francisco Board of Supervisors may soon pull its boycott on conservative red states after the move backfired and hurt the city’s finances as it begins to deal with budget shortfalls.
The 2016 ban on municipally funded travel and contracting failed to have any impact on those states’ policies and has caused the city’s contracting costs to jump by almost a fifth.
In 2017, eight U.S. states were on San Francisco’s blacklist. Since then, relations with least 30 conservative states which passed laws to restrict homosexual and transgender rights, abortion access, and enhance voting ballot security were affected by the city’s edict.Both San Francisco and the Democrat-majority state government of California have imposed boycotts and travel bans on the majority of the states in the country over social justice policies regarding race and sexuality.
San Francisco passed an ordinance called Chapter 12X in 2016, in the wake of the Obergefell v. Hodges decision that blacklisted states with gay marriage restrictions; but the regulation was amended twice in 2019 and 2021 in order to add additional states that passed bills on abortion and ballot reform.
The ordinance was meant to pressure conservative states to change their laws by pulling investment from the city’s residents and businesses.
