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Comment by anon291 | Hacker News Reader

I'm talking about approval for gay marriage not homosexuality. Obviously homosexuality is ancient. Homosexual marriage in the modern sense is absent from the historical record until 1971. Where it was portrayed it was typically as a joke .

I'm being down voted but I have no real stance on this. If anything I'm in favor of civil rights for all, but I don't see how that changes the historical record. Gay marriage is a novelty compared to female suffrage and interracial marriage.

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Interracial marriage was federally protected in 2022, and only permitted by court opinion in 1967 in the US. You better believe it was not socially acceptable in much of the South just because the court said it was legal.

Heck, I bet there are communities today where you cannot safely live if you have an interracial marriage. I don't think it's as solved as you suggest.

I lived in a lefty urban environment in the 90s and recall many people telling me I wasn't allowed to date noon write women.

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.

We have historical proof of homosexual marriage dating back to imperial Rome. IIRC the latest acknowledged homosexual union before modern times goes back to early 1500, before it started being prosecuted more aggressively by the catholic church.

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.

> Can you please provide written proof?

Was wikipedia too much of a hassle?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagoras_(freedman) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elagabalus

If you can understand italian I can suggest you Alessandro Barbero's Podcast, it's a pretty famous historian, there are several episodes about the topic.

I know where you're getting at - Not really the modern equivalent, only for the rich part of the population, contrasting opinions from historian at the time, etc.

But frankly the same objections could be raised even about the equally famous "did Ancient romans have running water in their homes?" question, and yet for some weird reason it's a far less controversial topic.

None of these were legal marriages. Of course anyone can stage whatever they want. This has always been legal even here in the US. The articles point out that no one actually held the emperor married to these men and just put it up to the emperor's eccentricity.

Moreover in the case of elagabalus, it's possible the stories were made up to discredit him and if they weren't made up they were highly scandalous and not at all well accepted. Forget marriage, even the insinuation he had slept with men was considered too scandalous to mention..

> Elagabalus had nothing at all to make up for his vices, which are of such a kind that it is too disgusting even to allude to them

You're taking a fairly strong stance, though it may not seem that way to you. "Same sex marriage was legalized in 1971" is a factual statement not in dispute. "Same sex marriage is a 21st century invention" may seem to you to be the same statement but it carries significant ideological baggage and is a way stronger statement way more in dispute. You go on to say things like "the real reason behind a lot of the LGBT acceptance rates going lower ... is that Muslim migrants have more kids and Islam is a very socially conservative religion." I hardly feel I need to explain why that is not a simple factual statement but really a statement of an ideological and political position.

So while I totally believe you may feel that way, you aren't simply being downvoted for indisputable facts, you've taken a position in a contentious ideological and political debate.

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

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