Whether or not the California Supreme Court rules in favor of same-sex marriage equality today, Californians will probably be voting this fall on a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex couples’ marriages. Apparently, 1.1 million signatures have been submitted, and only 694,354 need to be found valid in order for the amendment to get on the ballot — about 63% of those submitted.

What I don’t understand is why it’s so easy for Californians to amend their constitution. It merely requires a one-time majority vote by the public — the state legislature has no involvement. The process is exactly the same as for a ballot proposition, except that a ballot proposition requires signatures from 5% of the number of voters in the last gubernatorial election in order to get on the ballot and can be found unconstitutional, while a proposed constitutional amendment requires 8% to get on the ballot and becomes part of the state constitution and therefore by definition cannot be unconstitutional — although whether it violates the U.S. Constitution is another matter.

Under traditional ideas of constitutional theory, this is bad. Amending a constitution is supposed to be harder than passing an ordinary law because constitutional law is supposed to be “higher” than ordinary law. If you can simply amend the constitution by popular vote, what’s the point of having a constitution?

This is particularly troublesome when it comes to individual rights. One of the purposes of a constitution is to protect individual rights from being taken away by a majority. If a majority of Californians can remove a minority’s individual rights through simple popular vote, something is really wrong.

In 2000, a majority of Californians voted in favor of a ballot proposition to ban same-sex marriage. Had it been a constitutional amendment instead of a ballot proposition, the ban would have been enshrined in the state constitution and the California Supreme Court wouldn’t be able to do anything about it today. We’re just lucky that it came up in the form it did.

Oh boy. The California Supreme Court has announced that it’s going to issue its decision on same-sex marriage equality tomorrow, 10 a.m. California time, 1 p.m. Eastern.

I’m going to be on pins and needles.

(Here’s the official notice.)

Tomorrow the California Supreme Court hears arguments in the state’s same-sex marriage equality case. You’ll be able to watch the oral arguments online here at 9:00 a.m. California time (12 noon East Coast), or if you live in California you can find them on public access TV here. And you can read all the briefs here.