Orange Is The New Purple City Hall

San Francisco City Hall was illuminated with purple gels for the entire month of October last year as a salute to Domestic Violence Awareness Month, an issue that Mayor Ed Lee and DA George Gascon have wrapped around themselves in a cape of moral superiority. The only problem is that under Gascon, prosecutions of domestic violence lag far behind every other law enforcement agency in the Bay Area (click here for a thorough SF Public Press account). Equally hypocritical, under Mayor Lee the San Francisco Police Department has not bothered to test thousands of rape kits for reasons that still haven't been satisfactorily explained (click here for an SFGate story about Heather Marlowe who created a one-woman muckraking soliloquy about her own rape and untested kit). But who cares about consistency when there's a photo-op available?



This year the purple gels went up on October 1st again, presumably for the entire month, but the Giants managed to win their Wild Card baseball playoff game against the Pittsburgh Pirates on October 2nd and suddenly purple became orange. This seemed rather cavalier even by the Lee administration's ethically dubious standards.

So here's a toast to the Giants, and a hope that San Franciscans do our best to vote in some local politicians who aren't taking orders directly from Willie Brown, Jr.