A rainbow curtain has descended across Europe

Greece has become the first Orthodox nation to adopt gay marriage. Italy is now the only country on the Western side of the old Iron Curtain without equal marriage rights.

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, a rainbow curtain has descended across the European Continent. While the division used to separate Communist countries from Capitalist ones, today it separates countries with gay marriage from those without.

The Greek parliament today approved conservative prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis’ push to legalize same-sex marriage, passing the law with an overwhelming margin of 176 for and 76 against. Considering that many see the Greek Orthodox Church as the country’s raison d’être, it is notable that a cross-party majority of MPs has rejected the church’s campaign against this law. Greece has now become the first country with an Orthodox majority (a list which also includes Russia, Ukraine, Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria) to adopt gay marriage.

The change in Greece has left the similarities between Europe’s old Communism map and today’s gay marriage map even more stark than it was before. On the Eastern side, two countries are the exception: Estonia and Slovenia adopted gay marriage last year (15 Eastern countries, seven of which are in the EU, have constitutional bans against it). On the Western side, Italy is now the only non-post-communist country in Europe to not have gay marriage. It’s worth asking: what has made modern Italy the worst place in Western Europe to be gay?