Thread:Comments:California's same-sex marriage ban ruled unconstitutional; appeal expected/The US finally begins to crawl out of the third world/reply (4)

Actually, the Third World was initially used to describe any states that were not allied with either the USA ("First World") or the USSR ("Third World") during the Cold War. Therefore, culture is—in this original definition—also important, even if not so much as economy. The United States does bear some similarities to Third World countries, even though it is, itself, the benchmark by which the First World is defined. The metaphor implies that the United States has advanced less than the countries historically considered to be part of the Third World, putting its civil liberties on a par with theirs.