Most Held the Line

Democratic senators told their Republican colleagues, by name, that silence on SR 111 was “complicity” in violence against LGBTQ people. Nearly every Republican refused to cave. That kind of backbone is exactly what their constituents need from them every day.

The pressure on the Senate floor was personal, and it was meant to be. Senator Steve Padilla, D-Chula Vista, told his Republican colleagues that a vote against SR 111, his resolution designating May 17 as the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, Interphobia, and Transphobia, was not just a no vote. It was, in his words, the silence that history would judge them by. He invoked Pastor Martin Niemoller, the German Lutheran clergyman who spent seven years in Nazi concentration camps and, after the war, wrote the confession known as “First They Came.” Padilla read the opening line on the floor. “First they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Jew.” He paired it with a modern variation, “first they came for the immigrants, and I did not speak out because I’m not an immigrant,” and pointed it directly at his colleagues.  Every Republican who declines to vote yes on SR 111 inflicts, on him personally, “another cut in the long history of cuts.”

Then he told them how he wanted the voting board to look.

“That board should be full of green lights. And no silent or blank spaces,” said Sen. Steve Padilla, D-Chula Vista.

It was not a request. It was a public demand that every Republican in the chamber publicly endorse the proposition that disagreement with the LGBTQ movement is a clinical phobia, equivalent to violence. The pressure worked on almost no one. SR 111 passed the Senate on May 19 with overwhelming Democratic support and uniform Republican rejection. The Assembly companion, AR 111, passed on May 18 with only Assemblyman Greg Wallis, R-Palm Springs, the lone Republican to break with his caucus.

The Republican members who refused to cave deserve credit. They were named on the floor, by colleagues, as moral failures. They were told their no vote made them complicit in the murder of gay men in Iran. They held the line anyway.

The Shame Campaign, In Their Own Words

Padilla set the template. Silence, he said, is complicity.

“Silence in the face of discrimination is complicity,”  Sen. Steve Padilla, D-Chula Vista

Senator Josh Becker, D-Menlo Park, vice chair of the Jewish Caucus, drew a direct line between antisemitism and disagreement with the LGBTQ agenda, treating both as the same category of hate. Senator Laura Richardson, D-Inglewood, speaking for the Legislative Black Caucus, quoted Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at her colleagues.

“In the end, we will be remembered not for the words of our enemies, but actually for the silence of our friends,” Sen. Laura Richardson, (D-Inglewood) quoting Dr. King

Senator Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) closed the line of argument by tying SR 111 to executions of gay men in Iran, Uganda, and Saudi Arabia. The implication landed exactly as intended. A Republican vote against a non-binding ceremonial resolution in Sacramento was placed, rhetorically, on the same moral ledger as a regime that hangs gay men in public squares.

This is how Sacramento legislates by shame. The text of the resolution does almost nothing on its own. The floor speeches do the real work. They tell every member of the chamber, and through the public record every Californian watching, that there are only two camps. Those who voted yes are decent. Those who did not are a danger to their neighbors.

What the Resolution Actually Says

SR 111 and AR 111 call on Californians to “stand against hate” and to “support LGBTQ+ communities.” The phrasing is soft. The premise underneath it is not. The resolutions equate religious conviction about biological sex and marriage with violence. They make no distinction between a man who assaults a transgender person on the street and a pastor who teaches that God created humanity male and female. Both, under the resolution’s framework, are practitioners of a phobia.

The suffix “phobia” is the clinical language of mental illness. To call disagreement a phobia is to declare the disagreeing party not wrong but mentally ill. A pediatrician who questions puberty blockers in line with England’s Cass Review becomes a bigot by diagnosis. A mother who objects to her daughter sharing a locker room with a male becomes a bigot by diagnosis. A scientist who insists sex is binary and immutable becomes a bigot by diagnosis. The resolution does not argue the point. It assumes it, with the State of California stamped on top.

California Family Council, on behalf of more than 2,000 churches and tens of thousands of constituents, submitted a formal letter of opposition and ran a call-in campaign urging members of both houses to vote no. The opposition was filed precisely because the Senate and the Assembly had no opposition on record at committee, a silence that allows Sacramento to construct a false consensus that all Californians endorse the resolution’s framing.

Who Actually Gets Silenced

Behind the soft language of inclusion are real Californians whose grievances this resolution renders unspeakable. Female inmates in California prisons, under SB 132, have been forced to share cells with biological males who claim a female or bisexual identity. Some of those men are violent offenders. Some are sex offenders. The women housed with them do not get to leave. Under the framework SR 111 enshrines, the fear those women report is reclassified as a phobia.

Female athletes have lost championships, scholarships, and locker room privacy to male competitors. A seventeen-year-old at the Santee YMCA encountered a nude male in the women’s locker room and was told by management he had every right to be there. Women at Wi Spa in Los Angeles reported the same. Earlier this year, those women came to the Capitol and testified in support of AB 1998, a modest bill to restore sex-separated intimate spaces. The bill was introduced and then quietly buried without a hearing. The same Legislature that refused to hear those women is now poised to pass a resolution declaring their concerns a species of hate.

Gavin Newsom’s wife will never be forced into a locker room with a stranger’s exposed male genitalia. Working women, teenage girls, and incarcerated women are. SR 111 tells them their objection is a phobia.

The Pattern: Non-Binding Today, Binding Tomorrow

Sacramento has a documented habit of using ceremonial resolutions to establish a rhetorical baseline that binding legislation later builds upon. Assembly Bill 2943 in 2018 sought to classify counseling that reflected a traditional view of sexuality as consumer fraud. Senate Bill 219 in 2017 imposed criminal penalties for failing to use preferred pronouns in long-term care facilities. Assembly Bill 957 in 2023 would have required family courts to weigh a parent’s gender ideology affirmation in custody disputes. Each of those bills followed a trail of legislative findings first tested in non-binding resolutions. SR 111 and AR 111 add another layer to that foundation.

The findings of one year become the statutory hooks of the next. “Hate” and “phobia,” once installed in the official record as descriptions of religious belief, become available terms for the next bill drafter looking to justify a restriction on counseling, parental authority, or church practice.

The Evidence Cuts the Other Way

The resolutions also conflict with the emerging medical consensus on pediatric gender medicine. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services published a comprehensive systematic review in 2025 documenting serious harms associated with sterilizing hormone therapies and surgical procedures on minors. Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and the United Kingdom have restricted or reversed those interventions after their own systematic evidence reviews. To characterize legislative caution aligned with that evidence as an attack on civil rights is not compassion. It is ideology dressed as science.

Now Take That Backbone Off the Senate Floor

The Republican senators who refused to bow to Padilla’s shame campaign did the right thing. They did it under direct personal pressure from colleagues who told them that their silence was complicity in violence. They held their ground anyway. That is exactly the kind of moral courage this moment demands.

But the work does not end when the gavel falls. The same rhetoric Padilla used on the Senate floor is being used every day against ordinary Californians. It is used against the nurse who declines to use preferred pronouns. It is used against the teacher who will not hide a child’s gender transition from her parents. It is used against the small business owner who declines to celebrate a same-sex wedding on religious grounds. It is used against the student who quietly says, in a classroom discussion, that he believes God made human beings male and female. Each of those Californians is being told, at their job, at their school, and in the public square, that their convictions are a phobia and that their silence would be safer.

Republican legislators who refused to be shamed in the chamber must now refuse to let their constituents be shamed outside it. That means standing up, by name, for the woman fired for declining a pronoun mandate. For the teacher disciplined for honoring parental rights. For the pastor smeared as a bigot for preaching what every Christian has preached for two thousand years. For the parent labeled a danger to her own child for asking what is being taught in the classroom. The same backbone that held the line on SR 111 has to show up in committee hearings, in floor debates, in public statements, and in the local press, every time a Californian is punished for holding to biblical conviction.

Let this be clear, as it has always been clear from California Family Council. Every act of violence, harassment, and personal cruelty directed at any Californian, including those who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender, is wrong. Hatred of persons has no place in this state. Christians of all people should be the first to say so, and we say it without qualification.

But biblical conviction is not hatred. The historic Christian belief that God created humanity male and female, that marriage is the union of one man and one woman, and that sexual ethics flow from that design is not a phobia and not a danger. It is good. It is good for children, who flourish when raised by their mother and father. It is good for women, who are safer when sex-separated spaces are honored. It is good for men, who are called to faithfulness and self-sacrifice. It is good for the vulnerable, who are protected when the body is treated as a gift rather than an obstacle to identity. It is good for the whole society, because a culture that tells the truth about human nature is a culture that can flourish.

SR 111 and AR 111 are designed to make that conviction unspeakable. The Republican senators who refused to vote yes have shown it can still be spoken in the Capitol. Now they need to make sure it can still be spoken in every California workplace, classroom, and public square. CFC will keep filing opposition, organizing call-in campaigns, and equipping pastors, parents, and lawmakers to push back. The Capitol is not the last word. The people of California are.

 (Editor’s Note: Click here to see Senate Bill SR 111 introduced by Senator Steve Padilla, D-18, Chula Vista elected 2022 and the following coauthors: Senators Christopher Cabalon, D-3, West Sacramento elected 2024; Sabrina Cervantes, D-31, Riverside, elected 2024; John Laird, D-17, Santa Cruz, elated 2020; Carolyn Menijivar, D-20, San Fernando, elected 2022; Sasha Renee Perez, D-25, Alhambra, elected 2024 and Scott Weiner, D-11, San Francisco, elected 2016.)