Exhibit #A: Barry Bonds. The Scoreboard has nothing new to say about Bonds' steroid-fueled march to the all-time home run championship, except to note that he is lucky that he found himself in San Francisco while he was engaged in it. While Bonds is over-whelmingly regarded as a rogue player and a cheater elsewhere, since his only transgression involves drug use (and lying about it, but hey, it's an unjust law, right, man?), he's a hero in Frisco. New generations emulate heroes, and this is a city whose hero stands for defying fairness, law, tradition and authority to pursue personal goals. It does not bode well for the future.

Exhibit #B: There may be more unethical, untrustworthy, irresponsible mayors in America (perhaps even in California), but San Francisco's Gavin Newsome is certainly the most popular one since Marion "The bitch set me up!" Berry's heyday in Washington, D.C. Newsome betrayed his loyal friend and top aide by having an affair with his wife. Would you trust such a man? But in San Francisco, it's just about sex, so the dishonesty, disloyalty, and base meanness of this despicable conduct doesn't register as wrong. Earlier, Newsome defied the California legislature by allowing same sex marriages that were neither legal or valid, violating his oath of office and cruelly misleading the couples he married, many of whom somehow thought the marriages would be upheld (they were not.) But his irresponsible actions were cheered as heroic by most in San Francisco's gay community, who conveniently forgot that even popular changes in the law can't be brought about by edict in a democracy. Now, as Newsome gears up for re-election, polls show him with nearly 80% support.

This is a terrible indictment of San Francisco, which is sinking into the kind of non-ethical mindset that attracts rogues and charlatans, encourages corruption and poisons trust. If the nation can keep the San Francisco contagion of ideologically warped ethics from spreading, perhaps the city's inevitable crash---if not at the hands of Newsome, then from some even more arrogant and irresponsible successor---will reinforce the lessons America once knew well, but is in danger of forgetting. Meanwhile, the chances of educating San Franciscans about the basics of ethical conduct get progressively more remote. How can an ethicist convince those who have adopted the fallacy that defining right and wrong is a purely personal decision?