Speaking as someone that grew up in San Francisco, I wouldn't call it particularly tolerant anymore. At one time when the current political climate wasn't the d

Speaking as someone that grew up in San Francisco, I wouldn't call it particularly tolerant anymore. At one time when the current political climate wasn't the default, maybe yeah. So what I would say is the default cultural assumptions have changed from what they used to be and are now diametrically opposed to much of the country in such a way that if you are on the outside looking in, it appears "tolerant" because it is a better place for some groups of people that would be ostracized elsewhere. Meanwhile if you are from the inside looking out, you probably don't see that what you call tolerance and liberalism is in fact just a different kind of intolerance and conservatism because it is not human nature that is different in the Bay, just the goal posts. Or to put it another way, what seems liberal and/or progressive to others is simply "normal", the "default", sometimes even "traditional" or "conservative" here. Especially in San Francisco, Alameda County and some of the more populous counties (quarter of the pop in LA County alone yo!), if not quite all of the State. The scale is just different. Spend 25 years living here and visiting certain parts of the country really will make you feel like you're in a foreign country because you (hypothetically) and I (actually) grew up in a bubble.