Listening to the SCOTUS proceedings in the case of Obergefell v. Hodges today, Justice Alito and Justice Kennedy stated that they believed that, as far as they knew, marriage (or the cultural equivalent) had always been between between opposite-sex individuals, even going as far to say that it is exclusively between one man and one woman.
I'm fairly confident in understanding the latter to be false, however, I am curious as to the first part. Was Justice Alito correct in saying that same-sex marriages have not existed before the present day?
I don't know of any cultures in which same-sex marriage was widespread and accepted, but the Roman Emperor Nero married two different men--one of which was a child Eunuch who he loved for resembling his dead wife, so it isn't exactly the same situation as two males marrying each other as equals. The Emperor Elagabalus also married a man, but in modern terms Elagabalus probably would have been seen as transgender--he liked to refer to himself as the "wife" in his relationship and wore makeup and wigs to appear more feminine. At any rate, these were marriages between men and contradict the claim that marriage has always been exclusively between men and women, but they also weren't the norm in Roman society. Elagabalus and Nero were, um, eccentric individuals.