A survey by the Institute of Policy Studies IPS on perceptions and attitudes towards social and moral issues found that there is greater acceptance of gay sex, gay marriage and adoption by gay couples now than five years ago when the same survey was done. Overall, slightly more than 20 per cent of those polled between August and January said sexual relations between adults of the same sex were not wrong at all or not wrong most of the time, up from about 10 per cent of those polled in About 27 per cent felt the same way about gay marriage, up from 15 per cent in , and 30 per cent felt the same way about gay couples adopting a child, up from 24 per cent in Released by IPS on Thursday May 2 , the findings are part of a wider IPS survey on race, language and religion, and come at a time of greater scrutiny on the conservative-liberal divide on moral, social and political issues.
More than 4, Singapore residents were asked to indicate how they feel on a range of issues by choosing whether it is "not wrong at all", "not wrong most of the time", "only wrong sometimes", "almost always wrong" or "always wrong".
A similar number of people were polled in In general, people have become less conservative on moral issues in Singapore, with fewer who are opposed to not just gay rights, but also pre-marital sex and cohabitation, said the authors of the survey, IPS senior research fellow Mathew Mathews, research associate Leonard Lim, and research assistant Shanthini Selvarajan.
The changes were most stark on homosexual rights, though, mirroring international trends in countries such as the United States where there is now less resistance in this area amid greater advocacy by lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender and queer LGBTQ groups.
Comparing the results from to those from , the shift in attitude on the issue was more pronounced among the young. For instance, about half of those between the ages of 18 and 25 did not frown upon sex between adults of the same sex in the latest survey. In comparison, about 20 per cent in the same age group felt the same way in the earlier survey. Among people aged 65 and above, only about 10 per cent said gay sex was not wrong in , though this was already up from about 3 per cent in This divergence between the young and old was also reflected among Christians and Muslims polled, with younger Christians and Muslims less conservative than their older counterparts.
