I suspect that attitudes in Australia might be slightly less liberal, but I haven’t gone hunting for any research that’s been done here on the question.

The Australia Institute’s Mapping Homophobia study is now three years old, and the data it’s based on was collected nearly five years ago, so these figures could well be out of date.

The finding was that 35% of Australians think that homosexuality is “immoral.” Interestingly, the opinions of anglicans and catholics followed the general population.

The survey - which found that 84% of religious people disagreed with the proposition that same sex relationships were always morally wrong - can be found here:

http://www.stonewall.org.uk/documents/living_together_final_web.pdf

I suspect that attitudes in Australia might be slightly less liberal, but I haven’t gone hunting for any research that’s been done here on the question.

Incidentally, Bates in his 2004 book reports earlier British research which found that younger Anglicans were less likely to be opposed to same-sex relationships than non-Anglicans.

To contextualize Keizer, the paragraph that is probably the crux of his argument - which is about the way the church loses sight of its broader social justice mission amidst the scramble of internecine struggle - also touches on this:

My non-Christian readers are likely to see this disquisition on sacraments as a bit of obscurantist trivia having little to do with them or with the subject of this essay, and if they do, my trap is sprung. Yes, the eucharist has meanings peculiar to Christians — but it can also be taken as a universal symbol of how any community shares its wealth, its bread and its wine, what the old socialists called the roses and the bread. The consecrated wafers placed on the tongues or in the upturned hands of the faithful, one per person and all the same size, have a secular equivalent in the basic allotments of health, education, and welfare — of life, liberty, and the off chance of happiness — that every citizen at the common table can expect as his or her due. If the obvious implications don’t make you squirm, if they fail to explain why I resolutely refuse to apply the word “left” to the progressive side of “the gay debate” in my church or to just about any debate going on outside the church, then nothing will.

I wanted to post the link to the survey for a broader reason than just the intra-religious debate - first to point out that in general public opinion on these issues is now very much more liberal than culture warriors would have us think, and secondly I think it’s worth noting that there is much less appreciable difference in opinion between believers and non-believers on this issue than is commonly thought to be the case in a society with a lot of comparability to ours - particularly among younger people. I think we too often assume the American pattern is likely to be replicated here in Australia but that’s wrong.