Sheila Kuehl
When Kuehl was elected as a Democrat to the California Assembly in 1994 a Republican majority was seated for the first time in 20 years. This was due largely as an out-flowing of the enthusiasm stoked up by Newt Gingrich's strategy supporting Republicans for the Federal Legislature. Kuehl recalled "The Republican majority was quite a different kind of Republican, not a moderate, not a Rockefeller Republican. They were primarily Bible-thumpers and very right-wing. So it was not the most welcoming Republican group, though they loved Zelda Gilroy, and it was very difficult for them because they already liked me so much…. And to their surprise, we all got along very well. ...The Republicans were pretty horrible about LGBT stuff. They all virtually said stuff like, 'Well, they're all spawn of the devil, oh, but not you, Sheila….'"
Sheryll Cashin
Political involvement and activism has been a very common ideal in Sheryll Cashin’s family which is what subsequently has led to Cashin’s pursuit of racial issues including segregation and inequality. Her father John L. Cashin, Jr. challenged George Wallace in the 1970 gubernatorial election in Alabama. At the start of the civil rights movement in early 1962, and at four months old, Cashin’s mother was arrested while being involved in a sit-in protest at a lunch counter, while still holding on to Sheryll. Her father John was a dentist and was also one of the most influential civil-rights leaders in Huntsville and Alabama in the late 1960s. He founded a black-led third party in Alabama, the National Democratic Party of Alabama (NDPA), during the height of George Wallace’s hegemony and succeeded in efforts to enfranchise thousands of voters who had previously been excluded from the political process through Jim Crow laws. Cashin’s great-grandfather, Herschel V. Cashin was a radical Republican legislator in Alabama during Reconstruction. He was born in Antebellum, Georgia, and was the child of a white Irishman and a free-mulatto woman.