Just when people thought the election cycle was over, the San Diego City Council majority we worked so hard to attain will be put on hold as current Council President Tony Young has decided to step down to take a post as the CEO of the local Red Cross.

DOMA is the shortened name for the so-called Defense of Marriage Act. DOMA is a federal law that was passed by Congress and signed by President Clinton in 1996, in response to the marriage equality litigation in Hawaii in which Lambda Legal was co-counsel. Some members of Congress were worried that, if same-sex couples won the right to marry in Hawaii, the federal government and other states might have to start honoring those marriages. They passed DOMA in an effort to prevent that.

If you do not learn from your mistakes, you are destined to repeat them.

In the wake of last week's staggering electoral losses, the California Republican Party must admit it did not merely have a bad election cycle, but it faces a major crisis years in the making – and more severe than the one confronting the national Republican Party.

Fortunately, with every crisis comes opportunity.

Indeed, there is a huge opportunity to evolve into a "New" California Republican Party that can offer hope not only to our troubled state, but to the nation as well.

Days before the election Pastor Robert Jeffress of the 10,000-member First Baptist Church of Dallas compared President Obama to Hitler, telling 600 other pastors at a luncheon that if they didn't speak out on the election, it could lead to another Holocaust.