Beck, Marriage and The State of The Union

In 1578, 13 same-gender couples were united in a high Mass at St. John Lateran in Rome -- traditionally the Pope's parish church. Vatican clergy participated, and the couples took communion, were blessed by nuptial scripture, and ate and slept together afterward. And Marjorie Topley wrote about lesbian marriages in Guangdong, China, that existed well into the early 20th century.

The American Anthropological Association wrote in 2004: ”The results of more than a century of anthropological research on households, kinship relationships and families, across cultures and through time, provide no support whatsoever for the view that either civilization or viable social orders depend upon marriage as an exclusively heterosexual institution."

Byzantine Emperor Basil I (867-886), founder of the Macedonian dynasty, was actually married to two men, and both weddings took place in churches with priests presiding. Another gay union that was celebrated in ancient art and literature involved two Roman soldiers who became Christian martyrs and were subsequently canonized -- St. Sergius and St. Bacchus. They were described as lovers in Greek writings, and their relationship was considered a marriage.

Historian Allan Tulchin researched a same-sex union called an "affrèrement” in medieval France -- a legal contract that created a civil union between two men. Homosexual “marriages” also took place in Ireland in the late 12th to early 13th centuries.