ProtectMarriage.com
organization
ProtectMarriage.com was a collection of conservative and religious American political activist groups aligned in opposition to same-sex marriage. The coalition's stated goal was to "defend and restore the definition of marriage as between a man and a woman". Beginning in 2001 as Proposition 22 Legal Defense and Education Fund holding the domain name protectmarriage.com, the organization reformed in 2005 as a coalition to sponsor California Proposition 8, called the California Marriage Protection Act, and was successful in placing it on the ballot in 2008. Proposition 8 amended the California Constitution, putting a halt to same-sex marriages in California for nearly two years until the proposition was overturned as unconstitutional. While it was in effect, ProtectMarriage.com defended the amendment in a series of legal challenges. Ron Prentice was the executive director.
History
In 2001, an organization was formed to defend the previous year's California Proposition 22 against legal challenges, to maintain Prop 22's definition of marriage in California as being between a man and a woman. The group, Proposition 22 Legal Defense and Education Fund, formed as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and established a website at protectmarriage.com in September 2002. With California State Senator William J. "Pete" Knight serving as chairman of the board, the group reported "just over $266,000 of revenue" in its first year. Andrew Pugno held the role of chief counsel—he had been associated with Knight's marriage definition legislation since 1995.
“ProtectMarriage.com” enters the record as organization. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what ProtectMarriage and organization can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7251240. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2001, 2005, 2008 and 2002.
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This entry incorporates text from “ProtectMarriage.com” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.