The gay rights movement has sure come a long way. I remember when gays only wanted to be treated like everyone else and the government kept off their backs.
You’ve come a long way, baby.
California, the place where dreams come true and weird and wacky personal idiosyncrasies are normalized, has taken a giant leap for gaykind by creating a set-aside program that rewards gay people for, well, being gay.
This presented the good government folks in Sacramento with a huge dilemma: How do you know if someone is, like, you know, actually gay and not sort of faking it?
The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) has been awarding contracts to black- and female-owned businesses since 1986 under a state set-aside program. The CPUC created a “Supplier Diversity Program” to enforce the law and set aside “goals” for larger utilities.
The CPUC included LGBTQ businesses in the set-aside regime when, in 2014, then-Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill that required the CPUC to recognize “LGBT-owned businesses” as being eligible for supplier-diversity benefits. When current Gov. Gavin Newsom took office, he expanded the gay set-aside program to include other energy sectors, favoring LGBTQ businesses.
“In the years that followed, CPUC faced activist pressure as it implemented the gay expansion,” write City Journal’s Christopher Rufo and Austen Hufford. “BuildOUT California, a since-rebranded LGBT building-industry organization, sent a letter to the commission arguing that ‘homophobia’ existed within ‘the ranks of the utility companies.’” There was a problem because much of the set-aside money earmarked for LGBTQ businesses went unspent.
When CPUC was considering lowering set-aside targets for LGBTQ businesses, the powerful LGBTQ legislative caucus said that (perish the thought!) even thinking about lowering set-aside targets was an insult to the LGBTQ community.
By 2022, CPUC had fully implemented the expansion. In practice, this meant establishing a “goal” for utility companies with annual revenues exceeding $25 million to buy things from state-certified LGBT businesses: 0.5 percent of procurement in 2022; 1 percent in 2023; and 1.5 percent in 2024 and beyond. If “large” CPUC-regulated utilities met these “goals” in 2024, they would have sent roughly $633 million to LGBT-owned firms.
This scheme raises an obvious question: How does a business qualify as officially gay? Paperwork. Supplier Clearinghouse, a group that certifies firms for the CPUC program, features a list of qualifications linked on its website.
I should note here that the federal set-aside program run by the Small Business Administration is notorious for fraud. Government audits have routinely highlighted vulnerabilities. In 2014, a Government Accountability Office (GAO) investigation found that over 40% of women-owned set-aside contracts were going to ineligible firms. Other fraudsters made a black, Hispanic, or other minority a figurehead, putting all the paperwork in the fake CEO’s name and raking in the set-aside cash.
But in trying to cut down on fraud, California created an Orwellian “Ministry of Love” that requires people to “prove” they’re LGBTQ. In the novel 1984, the “Ministry of Love” specifically enforced the Party’s strict control over personal and sexual expression through the “Thought Police” and the “Junior Anti-Sex League,” which promoted complete celibacy, discouraged sexual desire, and advocated that procreation should only serve to produce new Party members, effectively seeking to regulate and “certify” allowable human relationships.
According to Rufo and Hufford, the entire set-aside scheme is “technically illegal.”
In California, preferential public contracting is technically illegal. In 1996, voters approved Proposition 209, which banned the state from granting preferential treatment based on race, sex, or ethnicity in public employment, education, and contracting. More than two decades later, in 2020, they rejected an effort to repeal the ban.
CPUC’s arm-twisting regulations violate the spirit of the law. The commission lists several specific “goals” for utilities’ contracting rates: 15 percent to minority-owned firms; 5 percent to women-owned firms; 1.5 percent to disabled-veteran-owned firms; and, most recently, 1.5 percent to LGBT-owned firms. It claims that these goals are not a “requirement” or “quota.” In practice, however, the agency cajoles utilities into compliance by requiring them to collect extensive demographic data, submit detailed annual reports, list their plans for increasing procurement from favored groups, and explain “any circumstances that may have resulted in not meeting” their procurement “goals.”
The certification process is intrusive. According to the LGBT Chamber of Commerce, applicants for money from the set-aside program “may submit either: One (1) document from List A, OR Two (2) documents from List B.”
A sample of eligible documents from List A:
Letter from three personal references attesting to the LGBTQ status of the business owner(s). Letters must be accompanied by a signed affidavit and must be sent directly from the reference person(s) to NGLCC. Letters may not be sent from employees of the applying business
Evidence of completed or attempted parenting and family-building efforts made by LGBTQ applicant(s) and same-sex partner:
* Second parent* adoption: Petition for second parent adoption, adoption records, and/or state required documents for adoption.
*In-vitro fertilization procedure: Proof of procedure from a medical facility, a letter from a doctor that performed the procedure, and/or medical records/insurance records citing the procedure
*Surrogate mother arrangements: Proof of surrogacy in the form of a surrogacy contract, proof of payment, medical records, and/or letter from surrogate mother and doctor.
A letter from a physician certifying that the applicant is gay is also acceptable.
The fraudsters will find a way around these certification requirements with ease. Medicare fraudsters usually had several doctors on the payroll to “certify” that fake medical procedures were performed. They also employed lawyers, nurses, and anyone else needed to submit the “proper” paperwork to fleece the government. Tens of billions of dollars are lost to these fraudsters every year.
The irony is that the LGBTQ set-aside program is a total bust. “Despite the commission’s efforts, however, utilities and businesses don’t seem interested in LGBT certification,” Rufo and Hufford state. “Large utilities’ procurement with LGBT-owned businesses decreased by 5 percent in 2024″.
So far, only 451 LGBT-certified firms have signed up for $633 million in potential set-aside cash. How many of those 451 firms are legitimate is unknown.
Related: The Democratic Party Base Is Angry. Is the Party Paying Attention?
Editor’s Note: The Democrat Party has never been less popular as voters reject its globalist agenda.
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