2004: Performed same-sex marriage despite state ban
In the year 2000, California voters approved a ballot initiative--Prop 22--that required the state to define marriage as a union between people of the opposite sex. For years we fought it.
During Valentine's Day week in 2004, then-San Francisco mayor
Gavin Newsom decided to allow marriages for same-sex couples to proceed anyway.
around the block, waiting to get in. They were counting down the minutes before a government would finally recognize their right to marry whomever they loved. The joy and anticipation were palpable. Some of them had been waiting decades.
I got out of my car and walked up the steps of City Hall, where I bumped into a city official. "Kamala, come and help us," she said, a glowing smile on her face. "We need more people to perform the marriages." I was delighted to be a part of it.
Increase child care subsidies; add to paid family leave
California's most acute preexisting condition remains income inequality. We stay fixated on closing unacceptable disparities. Rewarding working families by nearly tripling the earned income tax credit and increasing child care subsidies,
adding two more weeks of paid family leave, and raising the minimum wage to $14, on its way to $15 an hour. Providing first-ever health care subsidies for middle-class Californians so they can afford coverage.
Source: 2021 State of the State Address to California legislature
, Mar 9, 2021
Give parents tools to balance work and family.
Newsom adopted the manifesto, "A New Agenda for the New Decade":
Strengthen America�s Families While the steady reduction in the number of two-parent families of the last 40 years has slowed, more than one-third of our children still live in one- or no-parent families. There is a high correlation between a childhood spent with inadequate parental support and an adulthood spent in poverty or in prison.
To strengthen families, we must redouble efforts to reduce out-of-wedlock pregnancies, make work pay, eliminate tax policies that inadvertently penalize marriage, and require absent fathers to pay child support while offering them new opportunities to find work. Because every child needs the attention of at least one caring and competent adult, we should create an �extended family� of adult volunteer mentors.
Family breakdown is not the only challenge we face. As two-worker families have become the norm, harried parents have less time to spend on their most important job: raising their children. Moreover, parents and
schools often find themselves contending with sex- and violence-saturated messages coming from an all-pervasive mass entertainment media.
We should continue public efforts to give parents tools to balance work and family and shield their children from harmful outside influences. For example, we should encourage employers to adopt family-friendly policies and practices such as parental leave, flex-time, and telecommuting. Public officials should speak out about violence in our culture and should press the entertainment media to adopt self-policing codes aimed at protecting children.
Goals for 2010
Cut the rate of out-of-wedlock births in half.
Recruit a million mentors for disadvantaged children without two parents.
Provide affordable after-school programs at every public school.
Make every workplace �family-friendly.�
Promote policies that help parents shield their children from violence and sex in entertainment products.
Source: The Hyde Park Declaration 00-DLC4 on Aug 1, 2000