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In a recent poll by Pew Research Center, 92 percent of Swedes favored a legal right to same-sex marriage. Only 2 percent of Nigerians did.

There are various ways of interpreting this disparity. A first is to say that the question of same-sex marriage is a matter of civil rights—rights that inhere in citizenship in a specific country—and that different countries can define civil rights differently. In other words, the disparity, while perhaps interesting culturally, is no concern of anyone not a citizen of Sweden or Nigeria.

A second way of interpreting it is that same-sex marriage is a matter of human rights. Whether it is or isn’t a human right, the same answer should apply to all people in all countries. Believers in a human right to same-sex marriage can’t help but consider Sweden more enlightened than Nigeria. Some might be inclined to put pressure on Nigeria to change its thinking, or at least its laws.

A third interpretation is to treat same-sex marriage, and the underlying behavior, as a matter not of rights but of morality. Most Nigerians apparently deem homosexual behavior immoral. It is a crime in that country. Many people in many countries believe immorality ought to be opposed or suppressed. In this interpretation, Swedes are the ones who should be chided or sanctioned.

At the moment, and not least because Western attitudes on same-sex marriage have changed rapidly in recent years, there’s no broad and noisy campaign of Europeans or Americans to compel changes in the laws of Nigeria or other countries that forbid same-sex marriage. From the other direction, those who consider same-sex marriage immoral sometimes remonstrate Western countries for allowing it, and to the extent militant and terrorist groups like Islamic Jihad and Islamic State aim to expand the realm of conservative Islam, the remonstrance takes violent form. But on the whole, the first interpretation—that same-sex marriage is a matter for different countries to deal with in their own ways—is the norm.

This is likely to change, if history is any guide. At the middle of the twentieth century, the United States and South Africa each practiced differential legal treatment of different racial groups. In America the term of art was segregation, colloquially Jim Crow. In South Africa it was apartheid. Change came in America in the 1960s with the passage of new civil rights laws. Having, belatedly, made equal treatment of racial groups a civil right, many Americans agitated to make it a human right, applicable to all countries. The United States government began applying pressure on the government of South Africa to end the apartheid system. The American policy wasn't uniform or consistent; the Reagan administration eased the pressure in favor of “constructive engagement,” which emphasized persuasion over coercion. But Washington never failed to declare that a policy America had practiced until recently was now unacceptable in South Africa.

This wasn't the first time an offender became an enforcer. No country did more to expand the Atlantic slave trade than Britain. But when the British government in the 1730s outlawed slavery in the British empire, it sought to suppress slavery in other countries, employing the British navy against slave traders and using British diplomatic and economic power against slave countries.

The externalization of the British reversal on slavery and of the American turnabout on racial discrimination struck more than a few observers as hypocritical and smacking of moral colonialism. The complaint wasn’t unfounded. To condemn today what you condoned yesterday can seem two-faced to those not yet converted. And there is indeed presumption, even arrogance, in instructing others in morality.

What’s to be done? A laissez faire approach minimizes one's chances of being called a hypocrite or a colonialist. But it does nothing to improve the lot of those suffering oppression. What matters more—my reputation or their welfare? This is actually a legitimate question, especially when you factor in, as you should, the chance that you might be wrong.

Dictating morality to others—which is what any assertion of human rights entails—has its own pitfalls. One is the likelihood of counterproductivity. People don't like being told what to do. They prefer to reach their own conclusions. Reagan's policy of persuasion with South Africa was sharply criticized by human rights advocates. But Reagan had hardly left office when the South African government dismantled apartheid. Other factors were involved, of course. Yet it appears that Reagan's policy didn't make matters worse. In diplomacy, as in medicine, this is the first rule.

As for additional guidelines for dealing with differences on rights, they are prosaic. Speak your mind but mind your actions. Get your own house in order. Remember you're not perfect either.