California has found a new way to make government even more absurd: by requiring business owners to disclose who they sleep with to qualify for certain government contracting preferences. Having spent years in the architecture industry, I’m well acquainted with minority business certifications and the bureaucratic games that come with them. Even by those standards, this may be the most ridiculous diversity requirement I’ve ever encountered. It also serves as a perfect reminder of why the government has no business sorting companies into identity-based categories in the first place and why diversity certification programs deserve to be scrapped altogether.
It sounds like something out of a political satire, but it’s real. California’s LGBT Business Enterprise certification program requires applicants to provide documentation proving their sexual identity to qualify for government contracting preferences. So much for keeping the government out of the bedroom. To verify that someone is sufficiently LGBT, the certification process can involve marriage certificates, health insurance records, domestic partnership documentation, and even records related to fertility treatments.
And there’s big money on the line if you do.
The LGBTBE program sets aside government utility contracts specifically for gay-owned businesses, and the $633 million attached to it is not small change. To qualify, applicants must present a valid marriage, civil union, or domestic partnership certificate. If that's not handy, proof that you've used domestic partnership health insurance will do. Still no luck? California will also accept a petition for same-sex partner hospital visitation rights, or documentation of family-building efforts with a same-sex partner, including surrogacy, adoption, or in-vitro fertilization.
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I can still remember when leftists were against the government being in our bedrooms; now they’re all about government requiring citizens to hand over intimate details of their relationships and medical history just to be eligible for a contract… all in the name of diversity.
I spent years in the architecture industry, and I saw firsthand how diversity business classifications actually function in practice.
It’s not good.
Make no mistake about it, these programs aren't the noble equalizers they're advertised as. In fact, they're magnets for abuse. A business gets listed as owned by a woman or a minority on paper, while actual control stays with someone who wouldn't qualify on their own. Or, a certified firm wins the contract, then quietly subcontracts most of the work to a company that was never certified at all, pocketing a fee for the privilege of being a front. Sometimes it runs the other direction: an uncertified firm brings on a certified business as a "consultant," pays them, but still does all the real work itself just because they needed the MBE to meet a diversity requirement.
I once worked for a company that had no diversity certifications at all, and getting government contracts was a huge challenge because you had to subcontract work to other firms, since every government contract had diversity requirements. Around the time I left the company, they were considering creating a shell subsidiary that was, on paper, owned by women in the office so they could subcontract out work within the same company to meet the diversity requirements of a state contract. I also watched companies get restructured so a husband's business suddenly listed his wife as the majority owner, while he kept running things exactly as before.
This is technically legal, but hardly in the spirit of what the program claims to do. And now that’s the system California is extending into sexual orientation. And the fact that the state has to demand marriage licenses and fertility records to police proves the whole concept is broken. You cannot build a fair certification system around identity, which is why these programs are a magnet for fraud.
Here's the problem nobody on the left wants to address: discriminatory hiring is already illegal under both state and federal law. There is no shortage of statutes protecting workers and contractors from being passed over because of who they are. So what is a set-aside program actually accomplishing, other than creating a new class of preferred bidders based on sexual orientation, sex, race, or other classifications? The honest answer is that it builds a system where it's perfectly legal to discriminate against white heterosexual males.
All this is is government-mandated discrimination rebranded as inclusion. The Trump Justice Department should challenge these programs before more states follow California’s lead.
