What's up with California?

What is going on with California lately? Last year, they passed an initiative that banned gay marriage. This year, apparently there is going to be an initiative that would check immigration documents of the parents of any child born in the state when they try to get a birth certificate, report the parents to immigration officials if they can't produce documents proving their legal immigration status, and then grant the child some kind of a second-class birth certificate in an attempt to deny the child citizenship (see this BBC Mundo article, in Spanish).

Our Constitution states that anyone born in the US is a citizen. Our country's principles of civil rights are supposed to protect minority groups from laws that deny them equal protection. Why is California trying to circumvent these fundamental principles? What happened to the California that used to exist, where people stood up for the rights of others instead of trying to take them away?