LGBT tolerance slumps in the Netherlands as debate turns vicious

There is more to 'the world' than America. America was an aberration for legislating marriage so closely. Consider that someone in India in the 1800s would have thought that caste simply 'was', whereas the rest of the world would have been shocked by it. Similarly, anti-miscegenation laws, while common in America, and easy to think of as 'normal' from an American perspective, were not that common. Almost every culture normally socially approved of a man taking on a foreign wife, and most cultures welcomed foreign men who adapted into it marrying a local woman. There are countless examples from almost every part of the globe. It wasn't exactly uncommon. For the last two thousand years, the largest religions on the planet, would have supported a man and woman of different races to be married. Neither Catholicism nor Orthodoxy nor Islam nor Hinduism nor Buddhism (which together constitute the vast majority of the world) would have ever had any issues with interracial marriage. In fact, they would have encouraged it against a non-believer of the respective traditions. Not a single one would have supported gay marriage.

There is no debate. If someone were to point out a written record of an actual marriage that is using equivalent rites to a heterosexual marriage with exact legal recognition of that contract plus additionally rights over children, I will relent. This is not some ideological position. It's simply an absence of any such thing. For example, it should not be controversial to say that surrogacy is a modern day thing and that there is no historic record prior to it of a woman being considered the biological mother of a child she didn't bear. People are having their feelings about gay marriage override simple historical fact.

The Wikipedia page on the history of gay marriage makes the exact same point I've made. My statement is not controversial and is the accepted view. There are countless examples of gay people considering themselves married, but without societal recognition equivalent to heterosexual marriage. You cannot consider this the same as gay marriage because gay rights activists said that similar arrangements in the modern day were not enough and they needed to be married in an equivalent fashion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_same-sex_unions

There is no proof of homosexual marriage in imperial Rome. 'Marriage' as we practice it today does not have a direct analogue in Rome, but all the institutions one could point to that could be likened to it explicitly stated it was between a male and female. Can you please provide written proof? If it is common, it should not be hard to find in the extremely prolific writings of the Romans.

Your article is literally saying what I'm saying. I agree with you... homosexual partnerships are common, but claiming that they were the equivalent of marriage is ahistoric:

> At the same time, many of these relationships might be more clearly understood as mentoring relationships between adult men and young boys rather than an analog of marriage.

Of the western world it says:

> Conubium existed only between a civis Romanus and a civis Romana (that is, between a male Roman citizen and a female Roman citizen), so that a marriage between two Roman males (or with a slave, amasius) would have no legal standing in Roman law (apart, presumably, from the arbitrary will of the emperor in the two aforementioned cases)

Of China:

> While the relationship was clearly approved by the wider community, and was compared to heterosexual marriage, it did not involve a religious ceremony binding the couple.

Of early modern times:

> Michel de Montaigne, a 16th-century French philosopher and prominent essayist, reports having heard a third-party description of a same-sex wedding occurring some years earlier using the usual Tridentine marriage ceremonies of the Roman Catholic Church. The ceremony was said to have occurred a few years before 1581, at the San Giovanni a Porta Latina basilica in Rome and the participants were burned at the stake by the Vatican

It then claims Anne Lister married Ann Walker, but if you read the article detailing this marriage, there wasn't any sanctioned ceremony. Rather the two women took communion together and thereafter they considered themselves married. There was no socially sanctioned recognition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Lister#Relationship_with_...

> Eventually the women took communion together on Easter Sunday (30 March) 1834 in Holy Trinity Church, Goodramgate, York, and thereafter considered themselves married, but without legal recognition.

It literally says all this in your article. Did you read it?

The only references to pre-modern homosexual marriage are hearsay reports of Siwa oasis and the Phillipines. Neither of these cite written records or any sort of proof, and both of these would have been in somewhat literate societies.

There is no trend towards liberalism except in western nations, and even that is debatable. People operate under this assumption that everything magically becomes more liberal. It doesn't. There have been regressions and progressions. Progress is not guaranteed.

> Plenty of academic study backs this up, if you care to research it.

With all due respect to the academics, there is more to the world than the Western world and most academics in the West have no ability to comprehend the East. I say this as someone whose family is from 'the East' and so I think I have some more insight into it than many people do. The simple truth is that about 3.1 billion people alone live in India and China and the majority of people in the world live outside the West and these areas are not seeing any sort of great social progress. Sure, there's a lot of economic progress, but social progress in the Western sense is absent (progress in the non-western sense is continuing). There is no evidence that any of these countries are any more closer to embracing gay marriage than they were before. On the periphery of the west, such as the island of Bermuda, they actually repealed gay marriage. Even California, if they were to ask the voters, would repeal gay marriage due to the presence of Asians, Hispanics and blacks, who voted against it the last time they were asked.