To be fair, the 70% number is true but misleading due to a lot of the new smaller members in the East.
More than 80% of EU population is living in a country where either gay marriage or civil unions (which are pretty close) are legal.
More than 80% of EU population is living in a country where either gay marriage or civil unions (which are pretty close) are legal.
Consider for a moment, that in the responses below, people are actually defending and rationalizing that 70% of European nations haven't legalized gay marriage. Let that sink in for a moment. Now imagine if ~35 states in the US didn't have gay marriage, and someone tried to rationalize that away (oh they're just small states; oh those are newer states), what would the response be? Yeah.
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> To be fair, the 70% number is true but misleading due to a lot of the new smaller members in the East.
It's not misleading in the least. It's an annoying fact to europhiles perhaps.
New smaller members in the East... what are you talking about? New members of what? Those are European nations, it's entirely fair to count them as European nations.
Civil unions are not gay marriage. If all the US had done is to implement civil unions, it would be roundly and properly mocked for doing so.
Proportion of nations is misleading compared to proportion of population.
Those European nations that don't allow gay marriage collectively represent several hundred million people.
Besides, the majority of nations in the world are small, that doesn't excuse them not legalizing gay marriage. 70% is a very high number of nations in Europe to not have legalized gay marriage.
If the US only had legalized gay marriage in 15 states, such as California, New York, Washington, Massachussetts, etc. - it would be properly mocked as regressive and backwards.
Please, be more precise with the numbers. What is several? 2, 3? Because Europe has several hundred million people in total (where several equals about 7).
It’s possible for something to be both true and misleading - the 70% figure makes the situation sound worse than it really is, IMO.
The situation is bad, IMO, when the majority of European nations don't allow gay marriage. It's a grotesque travesty.
You keep harking on about the 70% number, and maybe that works with a certain demographic of people but it reads as pretty transparent here. 90% of the EU living in countries that respect Gay marriage is a great thing, and is the most concentrated acceptance of gay marriage in the world. But hey, boo Europe!
> the majority of European nations don't allow gay marriage
The majority of American nations don't either.
What is a travesty, exactly?
In terms of gay marriage that is good for the US: I think if every state could decide it for themselves a lot of them wouldn't have by now. Look at how slow marijuana legalisation is in both the US and EU when states can decide for themselves.
I think my country NL has been at it solo for 40 years or so. It's easy to think things like these go like dominos but they really don't most of the time.
Although I'm glad the other EU nations can't for their ideas on us a lot of the time.. so it's a trade off I guess.
> If you're doing the census of an appartment block, do you count the flats or the people in each?
If I were doing a census of an apartment block, I would count the number of flats and the people in each. For conceptually the same reason it's a good idea to know how many households there are in a nation as well as how many people total.
"The world is still extraordinarily backwards when it comes to gay marriage."
I then referenced the fact that 70% of European nations don't have legalized gay marriage, as partial supporting evidence for just how backwards most of the world is on this human rights matter.
The attempt was then made to rationalize the fact that the majority of European nations don't allow gay marriage. To which I replied accordingly. What's not clear about any of that?
Is 80% of countries representing 20% population more meaningful 20% countries representing 80% population? (Arbitrary numbers to illustrate my point.) I realise this is quite pedantic but I think measuring "covered population" is more relevant than measuring administrative repartition especially with the Schengen factor.
Of course there's progress to be made either way but can you explain to me in what way my heuristic isn't appropriate to you?