"It is!!"

"So what's your world like besides hair colors etcetera?"

"There are thirteen billion of us. We want children more strongly than humans and every country has laws about how many you can have. We're really excited about technology that lets us go to other stars, so we can have more worlds and have more children. We live in very very dense cities - Anitam has three cities of more than thirty million people - we have a way for people to write things and publish it so anyone in the world can read it instantly, it's very popular and people contribute all kinds of things..."

"Oooooooh."

"The whole world is peaceful right now, but it took some doing and might not stay that way. People are trying to shape up to impress the aliens."

"What things impress aliens?"

"The ones in our neighborhood care about the strangest things, actually - they want us to have one unified world government, even though that wouldn't be at all good for us - local rulers know their populations better and can be more responsive. They don't want us to interact with other species that don't have FTL and they're very upset about, uh, correcting flaws in embryos so they grow into smarter healthier babies. They don't allow caste systems - the hair color thing - and they don't care about the things we consider markers of a humane government, like transparent and consistent population enforcement and good city management. But they also want us to treat our populations better and I think on that front they've been a force for good."

"Not been treating your populations that well?"

"There's a hair color that is mistreated. And there were lots of compromises made under scarcity that accrued other justifications. It'd be a shame if they endured beyond the end of the conditions that necessitated them."

Nod.

"I am trying to imagine how you end up mistreating a hair color. People are presumably sometimes born with different hair colors than their parents?"

"You can't get red without a red ancestor - well, a mutation or something. But very rarely, and people'd presume infidelity."

"And red never marries not-red, or they do and then their red-haired children are mistreated?"

"It is illegal. Relationships probably happen secretly. The children are red if either parent is."

"Hm."

"Illegal."

"You'd probably find our government exercises a lot more power than I'd imagine a medieval one can or would be tempted to try to."

"Fancy technology lets you make marrying people with red hair illegal, as well as build thirty-million-people cities?"

"We had castes and a taboo on touching, let alone marrying, reds at your tech level. But it allows for consistent enforcement of a law across a population of six hundred million, and makes it harder for people to just - slip away to some place that's more relaxed about it, or ignore it."

"Wow."

"Yeah. We're working on it."

"Is it more complicated than 'okay now you can marry whoever you want'?"

"Substantially - is marriage in your country restricted to a man seeking to marry a woman and a woman seeking to marry a man -"

"As compared to what -"

"If a man wanted to marry a man? Or a woman marry a woman? Or three people all get married?"