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While the vast majority of Spaniards belong nominally to the church and Catholic leaders lobbied against same-sex marriage, the Spanish Parliament nonetheless approved the law. Spain’s big step also reflected the tenuousness of the Vatican’s hold on the everyday mores and behaviors in many developed democracies still spoken of as Roman Catholic. That dynamic informed Spain’s legalization of same-sex marriage in 2005. “They’re countries where the commitment to democracy and equal protection under the law was denied, flouted and oppressed, and the societies have struggled to restore that,” said Evan Wolfson, the president of Freedom to Marry, a New York-based advocacy group, in a recent interview. Why those four countries? People who have studied the issue note that that they have something interesting and relevant in common: each spent a significant period of the late 20th century governed by a dictatorship or brutally discriminatory government, and each emerged from that determined to exhibit a modernity and concern for human rights that put the past to rest. In the second: South Africa, Spain, Portugal and Argentina.
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In the first category I’d put Canada, Norway, Sweden and Iceland. The eight countries that later joined the club were a mix of largely foreseeable and less predictable additions. About two years later, Belgium followed suit. It was only a little more than a decade ago that a country first legalized same-sex marriage, and that happened in precisely the kind of forward-thinking, bohemian place you’d expect: the Netherlands. All were still pleasantly stunned by what Portugal had accomplished. With a potent case of Portugal envy, I went there and talked with advocates and politicians at the center of its same-sex-marriage campaign and with gay and lesbian couples who married after the law took effect in June 2010. How did that happen? And what wisdom do the answers offer frustrated supporters of same-sex marriage here and elsewhere around the globe? In the United States, only six states and the District of Columbia allow gay marriage. Although the country is hardly seen as a Scandinavian-style bastion of social progressivism, it’s one of just 10 countries where such marriages can be performed nationwide, and in this regard it finds itself ahead of a majority of wealthier, more populous European countries, like France, Germany, Italy and Britain. With minimal international attention, Portugal - tiny, overwhelmingly Roman Catholic Portugal - legalized same-sex marriage last year.