  It is shown that a gauged SO(3) family symmetry can suppress flavor-changing
processes from squark-mass non-degeneracy to an acceptable level. The
potentially dangerous SO(3) D-terms can be rendered harmless if the
CP-violating phases appearing in the SO(3)-breaking sector are small, which can
naturally be the case if CP is a spontaneously broken symmetry. This approach
has certain advantages over models based on global or non-abelian discrete
symmetries, and dovetails with some recent proposals for explaining the pattern
of quark and lepton masses. Moreover this approach relates the near-degeneracy
of the squark masses to an approximate CP invariance which can also explain the
smallness of the electron and neutron electric dipole moments.
