SR 111
CFC OpposesRelative to International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, Interphobia, and Transphobia
CFC Says
CFC opposes SR 111.
Currently at Governor, having cleared 2 stages.
Legislative Progress
CFC's Position Letter
May 18, 2026
The Honorable Steve Padilla
California State Senate
1021 O Street, Suite 7310
Sacramento, CA 95814
Dear Senator Padilla:
On behalf of tens of thousands of constituents, allied organizations, and more than 2,000 churches across California, California Family Council strongly opposes SR 111.
SR 111 designates May 17, 2026, as International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, Interphobia, and Transphobia (IDAHOBIT) and calls on Californians to “stand against hate” and “support LGBTQ+ communities.” While framed in the language of inclusion, this resolution embeds contested ideological claims into the official legislative record and treats sincere religious conviction as a form of social harm. Non-binding today, this language becomes the foundation cited by binding legislation tomorrow.
California Family Council Condemns Animus and Violence, Without Exception
Let this letter be clear at the outset. We condemn every act of violence, harassment, and personal cruelty directed at any Californian, including those who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender. Hatred of persons has no place in California, and Christians of all people should be the first to say so.
But that is not what SR 111 actually targets. The resolution does not draw a line between animus and principled disagreement. It collapses the two. A Californian who holds the historic biblical conviction 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 engaged in hate. The Legislature should not pretend otherwise. Conflating sincere religious belief with violence is itself a form of defamation, and it is precisely the move SR 111 makes.
The Resolution Equates Religious Conviction with Bigotry
SR 111 makes no distinction between genuine animus and principled, good-faith disagreement rooted in medical evidence or religious belief. Millions of Californians, including adherents of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, hold historic convictions about biological sex and marriage that this resolution effectively labels as hatred. A state committed to genuine pluralism should not use official resolutions to stigmatize the sincere moral convictions of a substantial portion of its own citizenry.
The resolution’s very title compounds the offense. The suffix “phobia” is the clinical language of mental illness. To call disagreement a phobia is to declare the disagreeing party not wrong but sick. Under this framing, a pastor who teaches biblical sexuality 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 pediatrician who questions puberty blockers in line with England’s Cass Review becomes a bigot by diagnosis. A scientist who insists that sex is binary and immutable becomes a bigot by diagnosis. That is not tolerance. That is the silencing of conscience by name-calling, with the sanction of the State of California stamped on top of it.
The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that government may not discriminate against religious viewpoints in public forums; embedding anti-religious framing in legislative findings pushes against that constitutional boundary incrementally but meaningfully.
Consider Who SR 111 Actually Silences
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 are violent offenders. Some are sex offenders. The women housed with them do not have the option of leaving. Under SR 111’s framework, their fear is reclassified as phobia.
Female athletes have lost championships, scholarships, and locker room privacy to male competitors. Their objection is not hatred. It is a plea for fair play and basic dignity. SR 111 reclassifies that plea as bigotry.
Women and minor girls have been confronted by exposed men in sex-separated showers, restrooms, and locker rooms. 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, California women came to the Capitol and testified about these experiences 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.
It Undermines Evidence-Based Child Safeguarding
The resolution’s findings directly conflict with emerging medical consensus. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services released a comprehensive systematic review in 2025 documenting serious harms associated with pediatric gender interventions, including sterilizing hormone therapies and surgical procedures. European nations including Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and the United Kingdom have restricted or reversed these interventions following their own systematic evidence reviews. To characterize legislative efforts aligned with this medical evidence as attacks on civil rights is not compassion; it is ideological advocacy dressed as science.
Non-Binding Resolutions Have Real Consequences
Sacramento has a well-documented pattern of using ceremonial resolutions to establish a rhetorical baseline that subsequent binding legislation builds upon. Assembly Bill 2943 (Low, 2018) sought to classify counseling reflecting a traditional view of sexuality as consumer fraud, drawing directly on ideological frameworks that resolutions like SR 111 normalize. Senate Bill 219 (Wiener, 2017) imposed criminal penalties for failing to use preferred pronouns in long-term care facilities. Assembly Bill 957 (Wilson, 2023) would have required family courts to weigh a parent’s gender ideology affirmation in custody determinations. Each of these bills followed a trail of legislative findings first tested in non-binding resolutions. SR 111 adds another layer to that foundation.
This resolution passed the Senate with no opposition registered on file at committee. This is precisely how Sacramento advances contested ideology without accountability. When no organization files opposition, the Legislature constructs a false consensus that all Californians endorse this framework. California Family Council files this opposition to ensure the record reflects otherwise.
California should be a state where every resident is treated with dignity, where children are protected from irreversible medical harm, where women retain the right to sex-separated privacy, and where people of faith are not labeled as practitioners of hate by their own Legislature. SR 111 advances none of those goals. It advances an ideological agenda that divides Californians and lays groundwork for future restrictions on parental authority, counseling freedom, and religious liberty.
For these reasons, California Family Council respectfully opposes SR 111.
Respectfully,
Greg Burt
Vice President
California Family Council
Official Description
International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, Interphobia, and Transphobia