12 Facts About Same-sex marriage

The most prominent supporters of same-sex marriage are the world's major medical and scientific communities, and human rights and civil rights organizations, while most prominent opponents are religious fundamentalist groups.

Anthropologists have struggled to determine a definition of Same-sex marriage that absorbs commonalities of the social construct across cultures around the world.

In United States of America same-sex marriage became an official request of gay rights movement after the Second National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights in 1987.

Since then, same-sex marriage has been established by law in 31 other countries, including most of the Americas and Western Europe.

In other countries, constitutions have been adopted which have wording specifying that marriage is between a man and a woman, although, especially with the older constitutions, they were not necessarily worded with the intent to ban same-sex marriage.

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Additionally, seventeen countries that have legally recognized same-sex marriage have an alternative form of recognition for same-sex couples, usually available to heterosexual couples as well: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, France, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, the United Kingdom and Uruguay.

Female same-sex marriage is practiced among the Gikuyu, Nandi, Kamba, Kipsigis, and to a lesser extent neighboring peoples.

The researchers took advantage of the gradual manner in which same-sex marriage was established in the United States to compare the rate of attempted suicide among youth in each state over the time period studied.

Once same-sex marriage was established in a particular state, the reduction in the rate of attempted suicide among youth in that state became permanent.

Some additional states that do not recognize same-sex marriage allow stepchild adoption by couples in civil unions: Croatia, Estonia, Italy and Slovenia.

Support for same-sex marriage has increased across every age group, political ideology, religion, gender, race and region of various developed countries in the world.

Various detailed polls and studies on same-sex marriage that were conducted in several countries show that support for same-sex marriage significantly increases with higher levels of education and is significantly stronger among younger generations, with a clear trend of continually increasing support.