Guest post from Jeremiah (not that Jeremiah)

 I ended up recently on Wikipedia’s Timeline of Same Sex Marriage article, and I noticed something interesting. It begins with a section called Ancient Times, and all examples of SSM before 1970 go into that section. After that they break things into decades (70s, 80s, etc.) Guess how much of the article’s content is in the Ancient Times section?
 
4%
 

96% of all of the evidence for SSM is from 1970 forward. 96%! And it’s obvious they had to scrape the bottom of the barrel for it to not be 100% . For example:
  • They mention a single marriage in Spain from 1061.
  • There’s a paragraph on it being referred to in a derisory fashion to describe political opponents during the Roman Empire.
  • It appears to have been legal in ancient Assyria.
  • The emperor’s Nero and Elagabalus married men.
  • It was part of the culture of an oasis in Egypt of about 30,000 people (that is its modern population, I assume anciently it was even less).

Reviewing this list you might assume that I cherry picked the least impressive examples, but actually the list I just gave is more or less comprehensive. These are essentially all of the  examples they could come up with. How is it that something which was so incredibly rare in the past has become such a huge deal in only the last few decades? 


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