Eighteen states allow their constitutions to be amended through ballot initiatives without consent by the legislative and/or executive branches. The remaining states enable their constitutions to be amended by the public after legislative and/or executive action. Some states require majority approval and others mandate voter approval ranging from 60% to two thirds approval.

The same-sex ballot initiatives exemplify the danger posed to all citizens by stripping away of fundamental rights from marginalized citizens and the importance of the judiciary in protecting civil liberties.

Barack Obama was born in Honolulu on August 4, 1961. In 1961, 16 states not including Hawaii had laws that made miscegenation a crime and branded the offspring of a black and white couple as a bastard. In 1967, the US Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia that miscegenation laws were unconstitutional because they violated the due process clause and equal protection of the 14th Amendment.

Given prevalent racial animosity in 1961, had racists tried to amend state constitutions to prohibit miscegenation, those ballot initiatives would have been overwhelmingly passed in most states.

During World War II, had xenophobes tried to amend state constitutions to prohibit the civil liberties of Japanese Americans, they would have been easily approved. State amendments to limit civil liberties could have been readily enacted against immigrants such as the Irish, Chinese and Jews, among others.

A democracy is measured by how it protects minority religious, political, racial and other individual differences. The US Supreme Court has addressed these concerns in various decisions including Loving v. Virginia and Romer v. Evans.