There have been discussions and debates on the subject if gay marriage for many years now, and though a few countries took the leap and legalised same-sex marriage, the UK only took the first step towards that goal at the beginning of this month.
Though there is still quite some way to go before gay marriage becomes legal, the fight for equality now has a foot in the door that can be used for leverage.
This is not the first battle for equality that Britain has seen, and it seems likely that, much as with the suffragette’s fight for the right to vote during the Victorian Era, the gay marriage fight will soon find a happy ending.
Though the suffragettes were significantly more violent than the supporters of gay marriage, the bill for universal suffrage only passed after the First World War, in 1918. However, there seem to have been varied reasons to the passing of the law - one of which is shared with the gay marriage question: other countries have already legalised it. In the XIV century, Britain was faced with the fact that quite a few other influential countries had already given women the vote, and the fact that British women did not yet have that right started to make Britain look outdated - a horrible prospect for such a great empire.
A similar situation seems to be happening now. Though, admittedly, competition between countries regarding their rights and laws seems to have less of an impact today, it must be agreed that the last country to legalise gay marriage (excepting North Korea, who works on a schedule of its own) will forever be remembered as the country who was against equality, or even as the country who tried to stop progress.
Therefore, though the road to equality is far from over, this step fowards seems promising, and gives us hope that, one day in the not so distant future, the sentence from the American Constitution, “all men are created equal”, will finally hold absolutely true in regards to the rights that all men and women recieve around the world.
