Got into another argument with my dad- he says he can’t believe that any previous culture or major religion anywhere has ever allowed same-sex marriage. I said, of there has to be. He said, name one. Well, the SDMB has helped me with my pointless political arguments before. I’ll bet there’s at least some, right?
You’re not going to find it, same sex marriage in the modern sense is a very recent concern. You would be hard pressed to find references seriously advocating it even twenty years old. Thats not to say there were no long term same sex couples, they just were not open about it so the openness had to come first.
You might be able to find transsexual individuals posing as the opposite sex and entering into marriage, there have been a couple of these where its a big shock to the coroner.
Some cultures had a open concept of a third gender which seems to encompass both gay/lesbian, intersex, and people with gender identity issues.
Some cultures have ritualized homosexual relationships, almost always they also have hetero marriage.
Forty years ago, in 1972, the Minnesota Democratic Party (DFL), by a vote of the delegates at our State Convention, added a plank to the Party Platform endorsing marriage equality. This was after one Delegate, Jack Baker (yes, the person in Baker vs. Nelson, the Supreme Court case) had been refused a marriage license by Minnesota Courts, and an appeal was pending before the US Supreme Court (which they declined to hear, eventually).
As late as the 90s in gay activism circles I remember the biggie was trying to kill sodomy legislation, gay marriage was maybe mentioned but a big issue it was not.
There have certainly been numerous non-Christian societies in which homosexual activity was either winked at or even tacitly encouraged. Gay activists have often pointed to such societies.
The snag is, even in societies that had no moral objections to sodomy, people would have laughed at the idea of men marrying each other. Even in pagan societies where men could screw boys without shame, those men still married women!
Were there pagan kings and emperors who engaged in gay sex? Sure- but Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and Trajan never attempted to change the laws so that males could get married. They’d have scoffed at the very concept. They themselves would have told you “Marriage is between a man and a woman. A man has a duty to marry, to father children, and carry on his family lineage. Now, after THAT, if you want to bugger boys on the side, well, that’s YOUR affair.”
Nope: In 342 AD Christian emperors Constantius II and Constans issued a law in the Theodosian Code (C. Th. 9.7.3) prohibiting same-sex marriage in Rome and ordering execution for those so married. So before 342 AD it was legal in Rome.
Direct evidence, read page 21 of this book:
“marriages between males and between females were legal and familiar among the upper classes”
That’s interesting and am dissapointed a book on gay marriage spends one sentence on it! Is there any particular reason why it was informal in the lower classes?(if you know more about it).
As far as I’m aware most marriages of lower classes both mixed-sex and same sex were informal in Rome. By the time of late empire before it’s conversion to Christianity Religious marriages had fallen out of favour and most marriages were entirely secular.
That book references a study by Yale professor John Boswell, who is the author of Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe. Presumably it goes into more detail on this.