Hah, this seems like a strange way to put it -- "get a gay marriage, go to jail". Maybe the word is used in that way, but I'd tend to say something more like "doesn't exist" or "isn't recognised".
And yet the news reports I've heard on the shooting in Charleston kept mentioning "9 African Americans". No one calls the "white" folks (that would probably be me) "European Americans" or "Caucasian Americans" in the reports.
Right - it's another manifestation of the subtle and pervasive racism in our society. It/we conceptualize and talk about whites as the "normal" ones, the default, and everyone else as not-normal.
I see some fair points in here. It's possible that what I've heard was influenced by the recent findings of the shooter.
But I'm just so pissed, because in my country (Bulgaria) the roma (gypsy) population are always treated (by the media, and unfortunately a lot of people I know) as non-bulgarians, non-citizens, even non-people by some.
But when say the victims of a violent crime are all white, the news don't typically say things like 'all five white victims were....' They just say all five victims were...' and whatever dependent clause.
I understand. I also understand that most media actively try to censor race from most crime reportage. They'll say something like "two males were seen fleeing in a car at high speed after the shooting". Why even say males at this point? Just say people. So, on the one hand they avoid mentioning physical descriptors like race, or age, for most violent crimes, on others, they actively highlight physical and psychological characteristics like race and mental health, and assumed bigotry.
So it's a very uneven treatment.
Also, statistics are unhelpful here. Overall whites are a maj. in the U.S. They may or may not be in the locale where the crime happened, and minorities may or may not be a majority in the place a crime happened. So it very much depends how large you want to make this "place"
2015 — Luxembourg, Ireland, United States of America
2017 — Finland (the law is voted and signed but not yet in effect)
> I mean, Massachusetts legalized gay marriage in, what, 2003?
It's a good point but not without issues to wit the possibility of discontinuation or invalidation (California, Australian Capital Territory) and the fact that subdivision-level generally lacks many (or even most) of the protections and advantages normally granted (not to mention commonly a complete loss of recognition and attendant rights on moving outside the sub-territory)
Not to mention the population of the US is almost larger than every other country on that list combined.
It's an astounding feat to have accomplished such a vast cultural change in such a short amount of time. I've read recently that upwards of 25% of the entire US population has shifted its view on gay marriage in just ten years.
GP did specify "the developed world". It is a very fuzzy criteria, but however you slice it it's a far cry from 195 countries. The IMF identifies 37 advanced economies and the World Bank lists 31 "high-income OECD members" and 28 Development Assistance Committee members.
Coming from a European, I think that's a bit of unnecessary quibbling intended to justify condescending to the Americans. The United States started out as something like the European Union: a partial union of sovereign countries. As such, the appropriate comparison would be to ask: where's the ruling by the European Court of Human Rights declaring that all EU members must implement gay marriage, or else? Get with the times, you backwards-looking conservatives on the Old Continent!
And, to this day, the separate regions, which are admittedly larger than states, actually do behave somewhat like different countries. The differences become especially visible when you look at public policies and development indices: different states in the USA have various levels of honesty in government, civil rights, economic development, average education, etc. In fact, on a state-by-state basis, some US states are more highly developed than many/most European countries.
Note that those dates are somewhat oversimplifying things. For example, in Sweden there was something called "same-sex partnerships" from 1995 which legally was equivalent to marriage.
It was equivalent to marriage in Sweden which is an important difference, civil partnerships are inconsistent[0] and not necessarily transferrable across borders.
You're right that just listing the dates for same-sex marriage doesn't tell the whole picture, but adding civil partnerships and their details would necessarily expand the comment to something closer to a book.
[0] for instance in France civil unions are quite literally a marriage lite, open to all and very commonly used as a legally recognised engagement by heterosexual couples (>90% of civil unions are heterosexual)
> not to mention commonly a complete loss of recognition and attendant rights on moving outside the sub-territory
That wasn't necessarily the case; a bunch of Full-Faith-and-Credit-Clause cases were also being litigated before this decision. Though it would probably have ended up as more of a complex mess.
No, because there is an objective difference. One pairing tends to procreate, the other cannot. The state has an objective interest in facilitating one over the other.
Procreation at this stage of our civilization is not the hurdle, procreating high-value citizens is the hurdle. Whether your value metric is happiness, ethics, wealth, income, etc., or whatever combination.
Once past the baseline survival of struggling to meet and secure basic physiological needs, arguably established for the majority in the developed nations, our species (not just "the state" groupings) should be blind to which groupings (not just pairings) facilitate the procreation and raising of high-value future adults, and if interfering at all, should instead focus upon which individual "family" groups are producing high-value results, regardless of the structure of the "family".
There are long and interesting discussions about what constitutes high-value; that's politics. But I don't subscribe to the notion that there is a currently-valid "objective interest" in promoting heterosexual families on the basis of straight-out procreation. If the species dropped to a population bottleneck level again, then sure; but absent similar catastrophic situations, I don't see where simply promoting procreation progresses the species' civilization, though I welcome counter-views.
To be honest, the couple that can't procreate isn't necessarily a same-sex couple. And many couples, gay or straight, that wants children but aren't able to procreate will adopt a child that would otherwise not grow up with devoted, supportive parents.
>Yeah, you should start leading again by cross-species marriage too.
They keyword is consent. Animals can't consent. Children can't consent. Having said that, in a few years (decades?), I could see poly-marriages also getting equal standing under the law.
There is no question that this is the case. This video a guy articulates this, be warned I suspect that his conservative opinions and religiousness may rub some HN users the wrong way. However I think his point is persuasive and well made nevertheless.
The graph-theoretic algorithms necessary to puzzle out polyamorous marriage contracts are going to be somewhat irritating to explain to the legal folks...
As I learned recently, you can click the time stamp of their comment and flag it for moderator review on the resulting page. That's the path to reporting hateful or unacceptable speech.
what? what's hateful? How's giving animals the status of humans hateful? I gave a no analogy there. I mentioned a possibility. Also, I am pretty sure 100 years back someone mentioning that gay marriage should be legal was categorized as hateful.
EDIT: Don't downvote just because you can't wrap your head around it. Their expression of love is a consent and marriage rules and interpretation can change like now. Also, legalize polygamy right now.
