Gay marriage is on the agenda in federal Parliament. New Greens MP Adam Bandt will move a motion in the House of Representatives tonight noting that a growing number of countries allow same-sex couples to marry and calling on parliamentarians to guage their constituents' views on the issue.

The Greens have also introduced a bill in the Senate to amend the Marriage Act to allow same sex marriages, but they do not plan to bring it on for debate for the time being.

Rather, the political game plan for the Greens and gay marriage advocacy groups is to build up momentum in favour of the reform in the community while pressuring the major parties to allow their MPs a conscience vote.

Majority opinion inside the coalition is solidly, although not exclusively, against same sex marriage.

Labor is more divided but many of its federal MPs also oppose gay marriage, some for philosophical reasons but most for pragmatic reasons - anxiety that the issue could cost the ALP votes in marginal electorates.

So what is the state of voter opinion on gay marriage? The advocacy group, Australian Marriage Equality, commissioned a national poll of 1,050 voters by Galaxy Research in October.

After being told same sex marriage was legal in countries like Canada, the Netherlands, Norway and parts of the United States, voters were asked whether they agreed or disagreed that same sex couples in Australia should be allowed to marry: 62 per cent agreed, 33 per cent disagreed and five per cent were undecided.

But Labor's problem is that even if a national majority of voters favours reform, the issue threatens to widen an already-problematic cleavage in its electoral base: the divide between the ALP's traditional working class supporters in the outer suburbs and regional areas, who are concerned with bread and butter economic issues, and its newer demographic of voters in the inner cities, more focussed on a socially-progressive values agenda.

We can flesh out the political geography of community attitudes towards gays a little more by delving into the pollster Roy Morgan Research's Single Source survey data.

Morgan's Single Source comes from face-to-face surveys carried out each week with around 1,400 people aged 14 and over.

The surveys typically reach more than 50,000 different people a year and, among other things, ask them if they believe homosexuality is immoral and whether gay couples should be allowed to adopt children. The chart shows the nationwide responses to these two questions in surveys carried out over the last 12 years.

Full story at source: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion