Gay Marriage Increasingly Legalised Across World

Now that the USA has formally legalised same sex marriage across all its states, the world has taken another step towards inclusiveness. It's part of an ongoing trend not to exclude consenting same-sex adult couples from designating their pledge to spend the rest of their lives together as marriage, just the same as we heterosexual married couples do.

Source: BBC News

For the past few hundred years of our 200,000 year history as a species, we in the West have had our definition of marriage constrained to a simple 'man + woman' pattern as defined by somebody as the 'biblical ideal' of marriage. Only now are those constraints being challenged, which is particularly timely because as of the 2011 census, 40% of Brits do not regard themselves as Christians and increasingly many do not really see why the church should be able to impose its narrow definition of marriage on them too.

Marriage has, of course, had a much older history than the comparatively recent Christian era. There was marriage in the pre-Christian ancient Greek and Roman worlds as indeed there was in the rest of pagan Europe, and those societies defined marriage according to their own definitions. Same sex marriages were going on during the Greek and Roman period as a fairly common practice. Same sex marriage even persisted in Europe as late as 1061. It seems that same-sex 'Boston Marriage' cohabitation between two women was tolerated in New England as late as the Victorian era.

Even more bizarrely, the Bible itself doesn't actually constrain its definition of marriage to the 'man + woman' template anyway, as this excellent infographic shows. If the Bible itself defines your spouse as loosely as potentially including your brother's widow, your concubines, your rape victim, your wife's slaves, your prisoner of war, your multiple polygamous wives and even your assigned slave partner, then what hope do we have of constraining marriage to a meaningful biblical definition?

Source: Upworthy.com

Increasingly, even the deeply religious country that is the USA now supports same sex marriage, which is reflected in their recent Congress vote, with similar results in Europe and Australia. Around 10% more of American people from all faiths and non-faiths are now receptive to gay marriage than they were in 2001. Figures range from 77% of non-affiliated people approving it, down to 23% of white evangelical protestants approving it, where a 10% increase is quite a shift in opinions in such a short space of time:

Source: Pewforum

The Netherlands was the first country to legalize same-sex marriages in 2001. As of 26 June 2015, eighteen countries have legalised same sex marriage with the practice recognised in six more. Civil unions and registered partnerships are recognised in some or all of 22 further countries and unregistered cohabitation recognised in four more.

That's an amazing increase in just 14 years and it shows the progress being made in simply letting two people who love each other proclaim their intent to stay together in front of their nearest and dearest.