Dear Marriage and Family Supporters,

Like many of you, things have settled down for us now that the holidays are over and our family life has returned to more of a routine. The threats to marriage and the family in Califronia and in our country have not taken a “holiday,” however, and it is time for us to re-focus on them.

As you know, we at United Families California were especially busy, even on Christmas Eve, gathering and submitting signatures to put a marriage constitutional amendment on our ballot this year. Unfortunately we fell short of that goal. We and the rest of the Protect Marriage Coalition are now deciding what steps to take next. It appears that we fell about 200,000 signatures short of the nearly 600,000 we needed to get this measure on the ballot.

Still, in many ways it was a remarkable effort. In the process of gathering these signatures, tens of thousands of Californians were educated about the threat to marriage. It is also quite an accomplishment to gather this large number of signatures strictly through volunteer efforts. What we learned from this will help us be even more effective in the next effort.

I do want to thank the thousands of you who signed the petition, helped gather signatures from others or otherwise volunteered to contribute to this important effort. I was overwhelmed by all the calls and e-mails from so many of you who wanted to help out in some way and who went the extra mile to gather signatures at their churches, among their families and in their neighborhoods.

The focus of our efforts to defend marriage will now shift primarily to the courts in the near future. The marriage case is now before the appeals court and United Families has filed an amicus brief defending California’s marriage law. You can read the brief here.

It does not appear that the legislature will try to pass legislation this year to legalize same-sex “marriage” as they did last year, since they know it would be vetoed. Their announced strategy is to hold off in hopes that Gov. Scharzenegger will be defeated in November and the next governor would sign such a bill. We will keep an eye on it for you, however.

This does not mean that it will not be a busy year in the legislature for us. Not unexpectedly, the current session has started out with a bang and we have already identified several significant anti-family bills we must defeat.

One of the worst of these is AB 606, already passed by the Education Committee and scheduled for a vote in the Appropriations Committee tomorrow, January 18th. This very bad bill is an extension of AB 537 passed in 2000, which encouraged pro-homosexual education in our schools. AB 605 would force district school boards to incorporate these pro-homosexual programs and curriculum or lose state education money. Senator Kuehl, who was the prime supporter of AB 537, has been trying to make this required for local school districts since she authored this bill.

We expect a vote in the Assembly is likely soon and we will suggest action you can take to help stop this bill in our next alert.

We are also watching a number of other bills that we will have to vigoruously oppose in this session.

Thanks again for the willingness of so many of you to stand up for marriage and the family. We need to continue our efforts throughout this new year!

Sincerely,

Meredith Richey
President, United Families California

P.S. While United Families California makes extensive use of volunteers and otherwise operates as efficiently as possible, we still need your financial support to continue the fight to defend marriage and the family in California. We have to pay for postage, office supplies, printing, travel to Sacramento to lobby and other expenses to be effective.

Please consider making as generous a tax deductible contribution to United Families California as you can to help. All money contributed through our state Web site, goes entirely to supporting our efforts here in California. The actual contribution is made to United Families International, which is a 501(c)(3) tax deductible organization and then credited back to our chapter.

Thanks for whatever you can do to help!

Contact Us for More Information

Please help even more by forwarding this on to others!

United Families California • PO Box 7653 • La Verne, CA 91750-7653