When I started this annual tradition of writing a blog post about annual progress on the fight for same-sex marriage around the world way back in the stone age of 2013, it wasn’t easy to find comprehensive information about the subject on the web. Now, thanks to some dedicated work of Wikipedia editors, and the exhaustive work of former journalist Rex Wockner, there’s much more information out there. So in this year’s update, I’m going to try instead to synthesize the facts, the developments over the past year, and what we can expect to happen in 2018.

Since this post can get very long, I’ve decided to break it up into different pages:

Same-sex marriage in Europe
Same-sex marriage in the Americas
Same-sex marriage in Asia, Africa, and Oceania

Overview:

2017 was a bit of a banner year for the movement. Several jurisdictions were added to the list of equal marriage countries: Finland, Germany, Malta, Australia. Judicial rulings for marriage equality came out in Taiwan and Austria. Three Mexican states, three UK Overseas Territories, and two UK dependencies also became equal marriage jurisdictions. We also had rulings and administrative decisions in favor of recognizing legal same-sex marriages from other jurisdictions in Armenia, Estonia, and Italy. By my count, this is the biggest single jump in the number of equal-marriage countries since 2013, when Brazil, France, New Zealand and Uruguay all legalized. Heading into 2018, more than 1.2 billion people live in equal marriage jurisdictions, and several more countries are either debating equal marriage laws in their legislatures or their Supreme Courts.

Populations of equal-marriage countries:

United States (including Puerto Rico, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, and the US Virgin Islands)	327,847,797
Brazil	209,567,920
Mexico	128,632,004
Germany	80,716,000
United Kingdom (excluding Northern Ireland; including Isle of Man, Guernsey, Alderney, Bermuda, Falkland Islands, Gibraltar, Pitcairn Islands, Akrotiri & Dhekelia, and St. Helena, Ascension Island and Tristan da Cunha)	62,969,237
France (including all territories)	66,842,000
South Africa	54,978,907
Colombia	48,654,392
Spain	46,064,604
Argentina	43,847,277
Canada	36,286,378
Australia	23,702,300
Netherlands (including Caribbean Netherlands)	17,000,059
Belgium	11,371,928
Portugal	10,304,434
Sweden	9,851,852
Austria	8,504,850
Denmark (including Greenland and Faroe Islands)	5,764,423
Finland	5,523,904
Norway	5,271,958
Ireland	4,713,993
New Zealand (excluding territories)	4,565,185
Uruguay	3,444,071
Luxembourg	576,243
Malta	446,547
Iceland	331,778
TOTAL	1,217,780,041

 

Populations of Countries with same-sex civil unions:

Italy	59,801,004
Taiwan	23,550,077
Chile	18,131,850
Ecuador	16,385,450
Greece	10,919,459
Czech Republic	10,548,058
Hungary	9,821,318
Switzerland	8,379,477
Croatia	4,225,001
Slovenia	2,069,362
Northern Ireland (UK)	1,864,000
Estonia	1,309,104
Cyprus (excluding Northern Cyprus)	1,176,598
Aruba	104,263
Jersey (UK)	100,080
Andorra	69,165
Liechtenstein	37,776
TOTAL CIVIL UNION	168,492,042

The total populations of the countries and territories with either same-sex marriage or civil unions is approximately 1,386,272,083.

Continue to:

Same-sex marriage in Europe
Same-sex marriage in the Americas
Same-sex marriage in Asia, Africa, and Oceania