We are living an age where the rights achieved by many years of civil rights struggles are crumbling. Particularly, the United States is living a crusade against women, gays and lesbians.

Western countries have always deployed the discourse of their supposed cultural superiority to demand other cultures to adopt western lifestyles and cultural views. However, the particular case of same-sex marriages shows that cultural advancement is not an inherent attribute of Western civilisations but is dependent on particular socio-political and socio-cultural contexts.

Same-sex marriages were not invented by the West; rather, it predates it and goes far back in time and cultures that are considered less advanced or civilised in some western intellectual circles.

Same-sex marriage can be found in China, in the province of Sijuan, where men would marry youth in beautiful ceremonies. It can also be found in some African tribes like the Azande of Congo men could also marry youth after paying a bride-price to the father.

Some native American tribes were also tolerant of members adopting female gender, which was seen as taking the form of two spirit type relationship.

Finally, we can go far back in time to find examples of same-sex marriage in ancient Greece and Rome, where same-sex relationships were a norm of society and coexisted with man-women marriages. Even emperor Nero was married twice to two men.

However, it must be noted that these same-sex marriages were not necessarily understood at that time exactly in the same terms as we do nowadays. Thus, cultural conceptualisations of any kind (and especially of same-sex marriage) are not fixed or stable givens but cultural processes that depend on the particular socio-cultural and political circumstances of societies.