As many of you know, the Mayor of San Francisco is a recently reformed teetotaler, after a round with a sex scandal. Well, now there’s this:
“San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s administration will change its policy on issuing laudatory proclamations after a gay porn studio was honored last week without the mayor’s knowledge, city officials said Friday.
Conservative activists and pundits nationwide belittled the city after Newsom’s office declared Feb. 23 to be Colt Studio Day, honoring the 40th anniversary of a San Francisco movie company whose Web site invites visitors to “come inside to experience the hottest man-on-man action.”
The official document, bearing Newsom’s name, was presented by a representative of the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Services to the company during its anniversary party. It said Colt Studio “has produced movies that have entertained the gay community over the past 40 years” and has contributed to the city by bringing in “hundreds of millions of dollars in business” and “stimulating the job market and the local economy in general.”
Newsom’s office issues nearly 2,000 proclamations a year, most covering such innocuous topics as Australian Heritage Day and Graffiti Watch Day. They are typically issued by the Neighborhood Services Office without the mayor or his top aides reviewing their content, which was the case with the document honoring the gay porn studio, Newsom’s spokesman said Friday.
But in the wake of attacks by conservative media figures such as talk show host Bill O’Reilly — who said the proclamation reinforced San Francisco’s reputation as the nation’s “Sodom and Gomorrah” — Newsom has decided to change the policy and have any potentially controversial proclamation cleared by either his chief of staff or director of government affairs.” Link.
So it seems that Bill O’Reilly now runs the moral timbre of our Barbary Coast pit stop.
As my friend in program recently put it about Mayor Newsom’s newfound clean and sober prudery, “I’m getting a little tired of this rehab means never having to say your sorry’ sentiment going around. Trust me, I’ve already got half of California on my amends list, and I’m not even on that step yet.”
