great australian presbyterians
The
Presbyterian Contribution:
A Centenary Colloquium
Avril Hannah-Jones
The Presbyterian Church and the decriminalisation of homosexuality.
In 1968 a survey was conducted to discover, among other things, whether Australians' attitudes to the decriminalisation of (male) homosexuality were affected by their church-going. The survey questioned 1045 informants over the age of sixteen from all over Australia, and found that only 20% of the strong, 17% of the moderate, and 21% of the infrequent church-goers favoured the decriminalisation of homosexuality. The numbers in favour of decriminalisation were consistently small; only 33% of the people who never went to church favoured it.
These attitudes are not surprising in themselves. What is surprising is that a year earlier, in 1967, the Presbyterian General Assembly of NSW had resolved: 'that homosexual behaviour between two consenting adults in private should no longer be a criminal offence', and had asked 'that the appropriate authorities be advised accordingly'.
For a brief moment: before the Stonewall Riots in New York in 1969; before the formation of the Campaign Against Moral Persecution in 1970; before the publication of Dennis Altman's Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation in 1972, the Presbyterian Church led the movement for gay and lesbian rights in Australia, a history that has since been lost.
Of course, it was not that simple. The support of the Presbyterians for decriminalisation did not equate with the acceptance of homosexuality.
The history of criminal sanctions against (male) homosexuality in Australia is an interesting one. The Australian law followed the English law, which meant that when the United Kingdom decriminalised homosexual acts between consenting adults in private through the Sexual Offences Act 1967 (UK), a decade after the Wolfenden Committee recommended it, reconsideration of the Australian criminal law followed.
As the Australian law was influenced by English law, so the Australian churches were influenced by the response of the English churches to the 1957 Wolfenden Report. The Church of England's support of the Wolfenden committee was widely reported in Australian newspapers. This concerned some members of the Church of England in Australia, who argued that it 'reflected the "excessive humanitarianism prevalent in Britain to-day, including the revoking of the death penalty"' The Church of England's reports were also used by Australian churches in making their own decisions.
In 1969 the Presbyterian Church in New South Wales released a report entitled The Responsibility of the Church, which argued that the church had no right to impose morality on the legal system. The national General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church then made a statement in 1970 that supported law reform , a decision reported on the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald as 'Church declares stand on deviates'. Among the reasons given for this stand were the fact that the 'law discriminate[d] unfairly against the homosexual as compared with the adulterer, fornicator and lesbian' and that it might encourage the seduction of children by men who would prefer adult contacts but who imagined that child seduction was less risky. Finally, the argument was made that sending a convicted homosexual to jail was 'as therapeutically useless as incarcerating a sex maniac in a harem'.
The church did not want its support for decriminalisation to be confused with an acceptance of homosexuality as 'normal'. Even so, the Church's statement was opposed by some members, including a Rev. Campbell who declared 'that man was an animal of violent passions which had to be restrained by law'.
In 1974 the Presbyterian Church of Victoria recommended decriminalisation in Victoria. Thus, by the time the Uniting Church was created in 1977 it had a history of supporting homosexual law reform that the Church could call upon in the debates about decriminalisation in Victoria and New South Wales in the 1980s. The Division of Social Justice in Victoria and the Board of Social Responsibility in NSW both gave the decriminalisation of homosexuality their support. Presbyterianism played its part in making Australia a more socially tolerant society.
Avril Hannah-Jones
History Department, University of Melbourne