Fifty years ago this month, South Australia became the first state in Australia to decriminalise homosexuality, beginning a process that ended in 1977 when Tasmania was forced by a pending High Court challenge to pass a law.
Until 1949, the death penalty was still on the books for sodomy in Victoria. After that date, lengthy prison sentences remained on the books.
The event that made the South Australian parliament act was the drowning murder of George Duncan, in the River Torrens, which flows sluggishly in a curve behind Adelaide University, where Duncan had just started to teach law. Detectives were flown in from Scotland Yard, and their report, only made public three decades later, indicated that three vice squad officers had taken part in the assaults at the gay beat that night.
I began my studies at that campus a few months after the drowning, spending a lot of time in the campus newspaper office close by the river. George Duncan death had a big impression on me, and while a member of the Evangelical Union I campaigned for what were then called gay rights.
At the time many evangelical Christians opposed decriminalisation.
Evangelical Christians opposed the campaigns to decriminalise homosexuality that spread around Australia, following the change in the law. For example, in 1973, the Sydney Anglican Synod endorsed the diocesan Ethics and Social Questions Committee’s Report on Homosexuality, which opposed decriminalisation, insisting “Homosexual behaviour, male and female, is an activity which affects the public good and, therefore, must never be given the status of an accepted form of sexual activity by society.”
The Melbourne diocese had called for decriminalisation in 1971, followed by other dioceses.
The Sydney Anglican endorsement of that 1973 statement has not been formally overturned. But if the debate over decriminalisation took place today, how would evangelicals respond?
The debate over evangelical views on decriminalisation had an echo at the 2023 Gafcon, a meeting of conservative Anglicans from around the world. This writer was there. This conference was held in Kigali, Rwanda, at a time when the Ugandan parliament, just to the north, had passed a new bill including draconian prison sentences for LGBT sexual activity or its promotion, which was awaiting their President’s signing it into law.
As the drafting of a conference statement took place, there were supporters of the law, particularly from Nigeria, the largest national Anglican Church. An early draft made it clear there are LGBTQIA persons in our churches that need to be cared for. That language was vaguer in the final version, which while endorsing the traditional Christian view that man-woman marriage is the place for sex, it added “we oppose the vilification or demeaning of any person, including those who do not follow God’s ways, since all human beings are created in God’s image.”
The draconian jail terms applied in Uganda were not endorsed. A harsh approach was opposed by leaders, many of whom stated that publicly. And Australian evangelical Anglicans were involved in the drafting.
While this undoubtedly means that today’s evangelicals in the Anglosphere don’t support the laws that remain in Africa, the hypothetical replay of a decriminalisation debate might see some evangelicals in opposition. It is hard to be certain.