I don't know anything about this or about who the Draper family is or what they're involved in, but my reading of your parent's comment was that they were talking about splitting California into multiple states ("want to split California up"), not about California seceding from the union. I'm no expert on this sort of thing, but these seem like very different things to me. One of them is about re-drawing very arbitrary lines, which are based on no clear principle I can suss out (maybe the strongest being that 50 is a nice round number?). The other violates a very clear principle ("Our Union shall not sever!") that the country's most widely respected leader fought a civil war to protect.

I personally have no strongly developed opinions on splitting states up; I'm interested in arguments in either direction. But the idea of splitting up a state with (at least) two portions that are quite far apart geographically and culturally doesn't seem ridiculous on its face. But I'm also not sure where that argument ends. I'm from another state - Illinois - that spans quite a few latitudes and has at least two quite different cultural zones. When I lived there, it always seemed to me that you could quite reasonably split the state into three: Chicagoland, the agricultural midlands, and the south. So if it makes sense to split up California, does it make sense for Illinois too? Are there other states that the same argument applies to? I dunno, I'm curious about it. But of course it is a non-starter politically, so it's just an intellectual exercise.