So, California's social conservatives got their way: a gay marriage ban will be on November's ballot, along with many other state-based issues, like transit taxes to cut back on ruinous congestion. And, as Neal Broverman reminds us, the States' democracy makes it easier to change a state's constitution than tend to civic duties.

Guess which measure has better odds of passing? If you said "the anti-gay initiative," you would be correct. That outcome is not based on an assumption that most Californians are homophobic, but the fact that it will take just 51% of the electorate to write discrimination into our Constitution and a whopping 67% to invest in our infrastructure and environment.
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Our federal Constitution is virtually immune to the whims of the public; it takes a two-thirds vote in both houses of Congress to propose a constitutional amendment, and then it must be ratified by three-quarters of the states.

No state makes it that hard to change its own constitution…

Forethought may not have been our forefathers' strong point…

Michael Guest stepped into the spotlight again this week. The former Romanian ambassador, who resigned last year to protest the State Department's gay inequality, held a press conference to highlight the Department's documentation of anti-gay human rights abuses.

Despite the Department's look at these abuses, that report, says Guest and his friends at the LGBT Foreign Policy Project, does nothing to address the stark, often violent reality of gay living abroad.

Our editor sat down with Guest yesterday to discuss the report, as well as the State Department's queer inaction, how to approach anti-gay nations and why even a flawed democracy matters.

Check it out, after the jump.

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Two MKs - Eli Gabbay and Nissim Zeev - have proposed a law banning gay pride. Activists, however, aren't taking the illiberal assault lying down: they're plastering the MKs' homes with flyers denouncing the politicos as undemocratic. One Jerusalem based professor summed it up: "This legislation is inherently damaging. If freedom of expression is impinged upon, Israel will cease to be a democracy."

America's founding fathers envisioned a nation free of monarchical tyranny - a nation where all citizens received the right to vote. In doing so, those revolutionary thinkers hoped to ensure the government spoke for the people. As any historian will tell you, however, that independent theory didn't exactly hold up. America's founders were looking after their own – white, Christian, straight and wealthy. Fuck rule of law. Land owners were the law.

Generations - and a Civil War - later, America extended nominal rights to black and, eventually, women. Despite these moves, it would take an entire civil rights movement to overturn racist Jim Crow laws, such as literacy tests and poll taxes. Now that all Americans have the right to vote, does America's voting system guarantee all voters their rights? Don't count on it.

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