WOMEN ON THE HILL

NEARLY TWO DECADES AGO, a man detested the idea of same-sex marriage so much that he began a 13-year legal battle across the state of California and the nation. State Sen. Peter Knight of Palmdale tried to invalidate marriage equality five times and was successful with his sixth, Proposition 22, which kicked off an epic legal battle in California.

Knight also had two sons. One son, David, is a gay man who once said his father was taking “uncaring, uninformed” action against LGBTQ+ people. His other son, Steve, became a Republican congressman, representing the same region as his dad, presiding over a district of blue-collar workers, a solid contingent of Mormons, a smattering of white supremacists, farmland, the suburbs, a little urban spillover from Los Angeles, and the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. That was, until last year, when the Knight dynasty was finally bested. In a form of poetic justice so rarely earned in American politics, a 31-year-old bisexual woman named Katie Hill took the seat in Congress.

“I’ve actually lived in most parts of the district,” Hill reveals. “The conservative elements