Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
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Notes -
That actually leads to a question that I wish would be asked more often -
Why isn't gay marriage the default?
There's an argument you sometimes hear from Western progressives that goes "there is literally no argument against it" - that is, gay marriage is so much of a no-brainer that failure to affirm it isn't even wrong so much as it is utterly nonsensical. If asked as to why it hasn't already been the case, a common answer is to blame Abrahamic religion and specifically Christianity. (Just above we see a variant of that answer.)
But if so, then why isn't gay marriage the historical default, and exclusive male-female marriage the weird aberration? Why haven't China or India had gay marriage for thousands of years? Why didn't the Persians, or the Mongols, or the Bantu, or the Mississippians? Suppose that poll is accurate - what's going on in Thailand, that not only did it not have gay marriage last year, but it also didn't have it for centuries?
Historically, marriage has pretty much always been primarily about child-rearing, which of course requires both a man and a woman, rather than pair-bonding, as most people see it today. In any society with that view, gay marriage is a ridiculous notion.
For the ancient Greeks, the highest love was that between two men (or a man and a boy) of equally high virtue. Those friendships were committed, largely lifelong, and frequently sexual, but they existed alongside opposite-sex marriages. The Romans weren’t quite as gay as the Greeks, but they generally didn’t see anything wrong with a freeman having sex with another man as long as he was the active partner (nobody cared what slaves got up to). Nevertheless, when Nero married two men (in one case as the active, and in another as the passive partner), all of Rome was appalled. If memory serves, we have other surviving sources ridiculing other purported same-sex marriages from that time as well.
Christians of course inherited the Jews’ extremely negative views on homosexuality, but even they saw clear differences between (chaste) same-sex friendships and marriage, usually extolling friendship as being the higher love. I believe St. Jerome even once wrote that marriage was only good because it produced children for the next generation of friendships to form. But the ancient Christians never condemned same-sex marriage because it just wasn’t a thing.
My understanding is that most Asian societies also didn’t really care about what sexual practices people got up to outside of marriage, as long as they also did their duty and had children within marriage (monks were of course excluded and apparently had a reputation for same-sex behavior).
Moving to the Middle East, even today in Afghanistan, there’s a saying that “women are for children and boys are for fun” (or something along those lines), which further emphasizes the universality of that link.
It seems to have been only in the past 150 years or so (at least in the Anglo world) that marriage began to be seen as obviously higher than mere friendship, and that the bond between husband and wife was seen as so special. I don’t know why that trend started, but I wonder if it might have had something to do with Victorian England’s strict anti-homosexuality laws leading to a de-emphasis on same-sex friendships just to be safe. Whatever the reason, that special bond started to redefine marriage. Once the Sexual Revolution and the pill severed the link between marriage and sex, and between sex and procreation, the common perception of marriage changed finally and completely. Now marriage is all about “the love of my life” and “marrying my best friend,” and all the tangled emotions that come with it. No-fault divorce helped here too, since it meant that the only thing keeping a marriage together—the only thing that actually mattered—was the emotional high of “being in love” with another human being. Once the high goes away, the marriage is dead, since those two are seen as completely synonymous. (Kids in such marriages are like houses, an asset to be divided when the marriage inevitably fails.)
With that redefined understanding of marriage, it’s completely arbitrary to restrict it to heterosexual pairings only. Two men or two women can love each other just as deeply as a man and a woman, and since that’s all that matters in a marriage, there’s no reason to deny it to them.
Now, take that final product, export it with McDonald’s, Elvis, and Levi’s, and you eventually redefine marriage for the rest of the world.
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A lot of it too I think is parents pressuring children to beget children. More so in the past, a larger family is stronger than a smaller number of family members. So while dalliances of the same-sex variety aren't extremely persecuted you still want your homosexual offspring to marry an opposite biological sex to make the family stronger.
I'm not completely sure on this point, but with same-sex marriage inheritances can fall out of the family easier with the spouse as an heir, something that could occur with opposite-sex marriages but those also have the chance of biological offspring.
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Because most people aren't gay, and most gay activity doesn't naturally converge on consistent pair bonding as an eventual requirement (involuntary reproduction isn't a risk in gay relationships, obviously).
I don't think it's much more complex than that.
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