Queer leaders and other politicos in San Francisco, including former ally Mayor Daniel Lurie, are blasting remarks congressional candidate Marie Hurabiell made on Monday about fellow candidate Scott Wiener, who is gay, saying they are homophobic.
In a 30-second video posted on X on May 4, Hurabiell bashed Wiener’s 2022 bill SB 357, which repealed a California law criminalizing “loitering with the intent to engage in prostitution.”
Wiener and the bill’s advocates argued that loitering was a vague, subjective crime that led to police profiling and disproportionately affected people of color, gay people, and trans people. The right nationally has long targeted the bill and used it to attack Wiener, saying it hamstrung police enforcement of sex crimes.
“Children are being raped multiple times a day thanks to you,” said Hurabiell, who was a registered Republican until 2022 and a former Trump appointee. She accused Wiener of turning California into a “predator’s paradise.”
The statement from the city’s politicos said they were “deeply disturbed by a recent video from congressional candidate Marie Hurabiell, in which she falsely accuses Senator Scott Wiener — a gay man — of promoting child rape.”
“This is a familiar homophobic tactic with a long and ugly history,” the statement read. “For decades, LGBTQ+ people have been falsely linked to the sexual abuse of children.”
The statement called on San Francisco officials “to decline invitations to participate in events with her and her organization, ConnectedSF.”
Asked by Mission Local to respond to her remarks, Mayor Lurie too distanced himself from Hurabiell, whose group Connected SF endorsed him in the 2024 election. Hurabiell was a mayoral ally, and Lurie attended two ConnectedSF events, including a fundraiser last November where he spoke about the city’s upward trajectory for a few minutes.
“I condemn this hateful message and am deeply disappointed to see our politics devolve into these types of attacks,” Lurie said. “Unfortunately, this trope has been used to deny LGBTQ+ people their rights, livelihoods and dignity for a very long time. I stand with the LGBTQ+ community today and always in the fight against hate.”
Lurie did not distance himself from ConnectedSF, however, and did not say whether he would associate with Hurabiell or the group going forward; Hurabiell took a leave of absence from the group to run for Congress. His team confirmed he has not attended Hurabiell congressional events, and would not do so.
Hurabiell was previously in Lurie’s orbit. The mayor and Board of Supervisors President Rafael Mandelman added a spot for ConnectedSF to their charter reform task force, which had some 30 members.
Lurie’s staff also set up monthly meetings between Hurabiell and Han Zou, the mayor’s director of communications and public affairs, according to emails obtained by Mission Local.
“The mayor would like to plan on joining your one-on-ones with Han when he is able,” Chesna Foord, the mayor’s director of scheduling, wrote in one email.
“We have a positive collaborative relationship,” Hurabiell recently told the Bay Area Reporter. “I think he’s doing a great job putting San Francisco back on track.”
Hurabiell, for her part, did not apologize for her remarks. “This manufactured backlash is a bad faith deployment of identity politics,” Hurabiell said in response. “Anyone in law enforcement who is trying to rescue children who are being sex trafficked will tell you that Scott Wiener has made our California a sanctuary state for pimps and gangs.”
Some California officials called for the law to be repealed, saying that it has made it difficult to combat sex trafficking. But according to Wiener’s office he spoke with the San Francisco Police Department when crafting the bill, and the department told him it does not use the loitering law to go after sex trafficking.
“These people are not focused on actual statistics about effective law enforcement practices,” said Wiener’s communications director Erik Mebust.
Joe Arellano, Wiener’s campaign spokesperson, added: “San Francisco is a city that prides itself on its strong and vibrant LGBTQ+ community. By espousing these bigoted tropes, Marie Hurabiell is showing us that she’s just San Francisco’s Marjorie Taylor-Greene.”
Scott Wiener long in national right-wing crosshairs
Wiener has long been a target of abuse from right-wingers on the internet who accuse the gay 55-year-old state senator of pedophilia because he wrote SB 145. The 2020 law eliminated a difference in how straight and queer people were treated in California’s sex offender registry.
Until SB 145, an adult having consensual sex with a child aged 14 to 17 would not be registered as a sex offender if their age was within 10 years of the teenager — but only if the couple was opposite-sex. Now this is the case regardless of whether the couple is same-sex or opposite-sex.
The statement was signed by many of the city’s politicos, including leaders of the Harvey Milk LGBTQ Democratic Club, the Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club, school board members Phil Kim and Jaime Huling, and rival candidates for District 8 supervisor — Gary McCoy, Manny Yekutiel, Michael Nguyen, Darshini Patel.
ConnectedSF is a well-funded pressure group that has set up neighborhood chapters to push its policies. It received $350,000 from Neighbors for a Better San Francisco in 2024, the latest year for which tax filings are available, which was the bulk of ConnectedSF’s $486,00 in revenue that year. Hurabiell made $240,000 from the group that year.
Hurabiell has a history of making transphobic comments, which was public knowledge when Lurie attended ConnectedSF’s events and when Hurabiell was named to the charter-reform task force.
“Trans women are NOT women regardless of your personal beliefs,” she posted on June 15 last year. “Science: DNA. Chromosomes. Body structure. They are human beings, and as such deserve the rights of any human, BUT they are not women. Women have XX chromosomes, a uterus, a vagina. Trans women have none of these.”
As recently as this February, she said, “Trans women are not women — you cannot change biology.”