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> Those are European nations, it's entirely fair to count them as European nations.

Proportion of nations is misleading compared to proportion of population.

Not in this case it isn't, due to the size of the population figures.

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.

> Those European nations that don't allow gay marriage collectively represent several hundred million people.

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 not misleading in the least

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 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.

Seems like getting 30% of countries in the EU (and thus 90% of the population) to legalize it is a great use of resources.

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!

Of all the things to grind an axe about "European nations", this is a pretty strange one, considering European countries have absolutely always led the way on this issue, providing limited rights to same-sex couples in the 1970s, same-sex civil unions in the 1980s, and full same-sex marriages half a generation before the US Supreme Court finally got around to removing bans in the USA a mere two years ago. What was that about a grotesque travesty?

> the majority of European nations don't allow gay marriage

The majority of American nations don't either.

> It's a grotesque travesty.

What is a travesty, exactly?

Unfortunately / luckily (depends on who you ask and what the subject is) we don't have a single supreme court enforcing / interpreting law for the entire union.

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? Same difference here.

Most of the world consists of small nations, compared to eg the US or Germany. About 130 of the 195 nations have less than 20 million people. The majority of all nations have less than 9 million people.

> 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.

You're right but I don't follow. Do you have a point or did you just really want people to count countries in addition to relevant population numbers?

My point was very clear, I spelled it out in the initial reply:

"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?

Your assumption that the number of countries is more important than the proportion of people absolutely doesn't make sense to me.

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?