By California Family Council (August 3, 2026)

Sacramento wakes up today. After a month away from the Capitol, legislators return to a stack of roughly 1,000 bills, all of it due for a final decision before the session ends August 31. Some of those bills will fund roads. Some will regulate insurance. But others will decide whether California lowers its medical standards even further for the most brutal and risky abortions of all, the ones performed late in pregnancy, whether every Californian’s insurance is forced to pay for sex-rejection drugs and surgeries for gender-confused kids, whether a Christian school can pray, and whether a man convicted of the statutory rape of a young teenager can still run for the school board that oversees his victims.

California Family Council is supporting or opposing 44 of these bills, each one touching God’s design for life, family, or liberty. Tomorrow our team of volunteers walks into Capitol offices to make the case, bill by bill, face to face, with the legislators who will vote on them in the next four weeks. The full list is public on our Watch List. Fourteen of the 44 are our top priorities this month. Here is what each one does, and why we are on the side we are on.

Bills We Are Opposing

• SB 685 (Cortese) — Special education: nonpublic schools and agencies. SB 685 strips the word “nonsectarian” from more than fifty places in the Education Code, responding to a federal court ruling that California cannot lock religious schools out of the program that lets districts place disabled children in private schools built for their needs. That is the headline. The fine print rebuilds the wall the court tore down. Any religious school seeking certification must swear under penalty of perjury that everything it does is “secular, neutral, and respectful regarding religion,” a standard no faith-based school can meet and still open in prayer or teach that a child is made in the image of God. The bill also forces certified schools to deliver the same instruction as public schools, including California’s comprehensive sex-education curriculum, and bars any school policy that could be read as holding staff or students to a biblical standard of conduct. Families of disabled children, some of the most vulnerable in the state, are left choosing between their child’s placement and their convictions. The Supreme Court settled this exact question in Carson v. Makin: a state cannot open a public benefit and then close it to a school for being religious. SB 685 tries to get there anyway, through a loyalty oath instead of a label.
   
• AB 1540 (González) — 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline: LGBTQ+ youth. This bill spends five million taxpayer dollars rebuilding the “Press 3” option that once routed LGBTQ-identified youth calling the 988 crisis line to activist-aligned counseling organizations, a federal program the Trump administration ended last year. CFC Vice President Greg Burt has been direct about the danger: “No parent should learn their child was in a suicidal crisis only after a state-funded advocacy organization has already shaped the conversation. AB 1540 doesn’t protect children; it hides them from their parents.” A 14-year-old in crisis could be connected to counselors selected for ideology, not clinical excellence, and mom and dad would never know the call happened. Suicide prevention should mean getting every child to a trained counselor focused on keeping them alive, not a hotline sorted by identity before help arrives.
   
• AB 2540 (Stefani) — Public health: student health centers: abortion by medication techniques. AB 2540 extends California’s 2019 mandate that UC and CSU health centers offer the abortion pill to community college campuses as well, once the Legislature appropriates the money, and requires all three systems to actively promote the service to students. This bill deepens California’s public dollar advocacy for abortion at the community college level, reaching some of the youngest and most financially vulnerable students in the state’s higher education system, without offering the practical, life-affirming support that helps a young mother choose differently.
   
• AB 2164 (Bauer-Kahan) — Legally protected abortion and sterilizing activities. Branded the “Care Without Fear Act,” AB 2164 was written after Governor Newsom declined to extradite a Bay Area doctor accused by Louisiana of mailing abortion pills to a woman there. This bill makes that decision permanent and takes it out of any future governor’s hands. It bars the Governor from ever recognizing an extradition request tied to abortion or gender rejecting drugs and surgeries provided from inside California, unless the demanding state can prove the person was physically present when the alleged crime occurred, a bar most telemedicine providers will never meet. California is not just protecting its own residents; it is building a permanent shield for anyone who ships abortion pills or “gender-affirming” care across state lines, no matter what the receiving state’s laws say, and no matter who gets hurt on the other end.
   
• AB 2691 (Addis) — Elections: elective office: felony conviction. As written and passed unanimously by the Assembly, AB 2691 would have permanently barred anyone convicted of felony sexual assault or human trafficking from holding office in California, a policy CFC supports without reservation. Then Senator Scott Wiener’s Elections Committee amended it. The current version exempts felony sodomy, oral copulation, and sexual penetration from the definition of disqualifying “sexual assault” whenever the victim is a minor between 14 and 16 years old, and the offender is over 21. Greg Burt told the committee directly: “When we read the amendment to AB 2691, our honest reaction was that it could not be real. We sat in our office and tried to imagine how anyone could stand up and defend it.” A bill meant to keep predators out of public office should protect every victim, not carve out the youngest ones. CFC’s position is simple: strip the exemption and restore the bill the Assembly already passed 67 to 0.
   
• AB 2563 (Pacheco) — Sex discrimination: scope. AB 2563 writes a sweeping new definition of “sex discrimination” into every California statute that touches the word “sex” or “gender,” expanding it to cover gender identity, gender expression, “degree of conformity to sex or gender stereotypes,” and access to sex rejecting drugs and surgeries. Once this passes, every existing law on the books that was written to protect women as women, in employment, housing, education, and beyond, is reinterpreted through a lens that erases the very distinction those laws were built to protect. Biological sex stops being a category the law can meaningfully recognize anywhere in the state code.
   
• AB 1876 (Addis) — Health care coverage: nondiscrimination. The “Fair Care for All Act” bars health insurers from denying coverage based on sex, defined here to include gender identity, and prohibits insurers from limiting services based on a patient’s “sex assigned at birth” versus their gender identity. Greg Burt laid out the real-world effect for families: “By treating an insurer’s denial of coverage as unlawful discrimination, AB 1876 removes insurers’ discretion to assess medical necessity, long-term risks, and evolving scientific evidence, particularly when the patient is a minor.” This bill arrives the same year the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reviewed the pediatric gender-medicine evidence base and found weak support alongside serious, irreversible risks. AB 1876 tells insurers their medical judgment does not matter once “discrimination” is the charge.
   
• AB 1578 (Jackson) — Anti-hate speech training for elected officials. AB 1578 adds one hour of mandatory “anti-hate speech” training to the sexual harassment instruction already required of every state and local elected official in California, from legislators down to school board trustees. The bill never defines hate speech. That is not a drafting oversight; it is the entire danger. In committee testimony, a witness described being accused of “hate” twice in legislative hearings for saying, accurately, that boys do not belong in girls’ sports. Handing the state an undefined category of prohibited speech, then mandating training against it for every elected official in California, is a blueprint for punishing ordinary, true, and constitutionally protected testimony the moment it offends the wrong constituency.
   
• AB 2531 (Irwin) — Public health: abortion services. AB 2531 extends California’s uncompensated abortion and contraception grant program to women veterans whose VA coverage no longer includes abortion, and requires the Department of Veterans Affairs to link directly to the state’s abortion information website. California continues to build every available on-ramp to abortion into agencies that have nothing to do with reproductive health, this time using the veterans’ benefits system, rather than directing resources toward veterans’ actual medical, housing, or mental health needs.
   
• SB 934 (Wiener) — Counseling: civil liability. Weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 8-1 in Chiles v. Salazar that talk therapy between a willing client and a counselor is protected speech, and that laws restricting it face strict scrutiny, Senator Wiener introduced SB 934 to accomplish by lawsuit what the (Supreme( Court just said cannot be accomplished by ban. The bill creates a functionally perpetual statute of limitations for “conversion therapy” claims: 22 years after a minor turns 18, 10 years for adults, and even then the clock does not start until the client “discovers” the harm, which a plaintiff’s attorney can argue was only yesterday. Any counselor who helps a client live according to their faith and their biological sex, rather than affirm a different identity, now faces open-ended financial exposure for a conversation that already happened years or decades ago. The Court said the state cannot regulate this speech directly. SB 934 tries to bankrupt it instead.
   
• AB 1973 (Aguiar-Curry) — Abortion: authorized procedures. AB 1973 lets nurse practitioners, certified nurse-midwives, and physician assistants perform brutal and risky second- and third-trimester abortions without a supervising physician present, once they complete abortion-specific training. These are the highest-risk abortion procedures that exist, and California is loosening, not tightening, who is allowed to perform them without a doctor in the room. Greg Burt raised the question no one on the committee could answer: “Why is the preoccupation always with expanding abortion and not with supporting mothers who might choose differently with real help? There are more families wanting to adopt than children available. Where are the bills promoting adoption?”

Bills We Are Supporting

• SB 356 (Jones) — Elderly Parole Program. SB 356 raises the minimum age and time-served requirements for California’s Elderly Parole Program, closing a 2020 loophole that let habitual sex offenders and child predators seek early release at 50 years old after just 20 years served. The bill moved after the state parole board granted early release to David Allen Funston, a convicted child molester, sparking bipartisan outrage across the state. SB 356 restores a basic principle: justice for child victims does not expire just because their attacker gets older. We support it without reservation.
   
• AB 1705 (Bauer-Kahan / Dixon) — Pornographic internet websites. Known as the RECLAIM Act, AB 1705 requires operators of pornographic websites to exercise ordinary care to confirm that every piece of sexually explicit content on their platform depicts a consenting adult, closing the door on nonconsensual intimate images and material involving minors that these platforms have too often hosted with no accountability. This bill passed the Assembly 72 to 0. Protecting women and children from exploitation online is common ground, and CFC is glad to stand with legislators on both sides of the aisle to see it through the Senate.
   
• SB 1188 (Archuleta) — Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps: home instruction, independent study, and private schools. SB 1188 writes into California law what federal law has required since 2020: any public secondary school that runs a JROTC program must open it to homeschooled students in its area who are otherwise qualified but for their enrollment status. Families who choose to homeschool are exercising a God-given right to direct their children’s upbringing, and that choice should never cost a teenager the chance to pursue a program that could shape his character and his future service to this country. We support giving homeschool and independent-study families equal footing.

Tomorrow We Show Up

Scripture calls us to “open your mouth for the mute, for the rights of all who are destitute” (Proverbs 31:8). Tomorrow, CFC’s team carries that charge into the halls of the Capitol, one office at a time, on behalf of unborn children, disabled students, homeschool families, parents kept in the dark, and counselors and pastors who simply want to keep doing their jobs without state-sponsored retaliation. Forty-four bills. One month left. We will be there for every one of them.

If you want to add your voice, visit CFC’s Action Center to find your legislator and send a message before these bills reach the floor.