Legal Insurrection by Elizabeth Stauffer 6/17/2026
“If I was a straight, white male, I might be concerned I don’t have the same opportunity,” Horton said. “It worked out great for me.” It most certainly did.If California officials were searching for a way to make the state look more ridiculous, they may have just found it.
City Journal contributors Christopher Rufo and Austen Hufford reported Tuesday that the state is now “pressuring public utilities to award $633 million in special contracts to ‘LGBT-owned’ firms. To qualify, residents must go through the state’s official gay-certification program — and face up to a year in jail if they’re not gay enough.”
Lots of paperwork involved in order to be certified as gay in California.
Rufo and Hufford explained that the program is administered by the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), the agency that oversees privately owned utility companies. Considering that in 2025, California utilities spent more than $43 billion on outside contractors supplying services related to water, natural gas, electricity, and telecommunications, there is a lot of money to be made by companies that qualify for LGBT-status.
California’s supplier-diversity initiative dates back to 1986, when Gov. George Deukmejian signed legislation requiring certain utilities to develop plans for doing business with women- and minority-owned companies. The CPUC later formalized those efforts through its Supplier Diversity Program “which would enforce the law and set contracting ‘goals’ for large utilities.”
The pair detailed how the initiative grew to include LGBT-owned businesses under subsequent Democratic administrations and how, by 2022, they were fully incorporated into the program.
Large utilities were given contracting targets that rose from 0.5% in 2022 to 1.5% beginning in 2024. Had those goals been met last year, LGBT-certified businesses would have received roughly $633 million in contracts.
In the years that followed, CPUC faced activist pressure as it implemented the gay expansion. 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.” The state’s legislative LGBTQ caucus suggested in a 2021 letter that even considering lower gay-procurement 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.
More:
https://legalinsurrection.com/2026/06/the-curious-case-of-californias-lgbt-owned-business-certification-program/
