2025 IPS survey: Singaporeans more accepting of gay sex, marriage, surrogacy, ART and adoption

Описание: An Institute of Policy Studies (IPS) study published on Thursday, 28 August 2025 revealed that the proportion of people who thought gay sex and marriage were wrong had fallen over the past decade. Between 2013 and 2024, those who disapproved of gay sex fell by about 27 percentage points, while those who disapprove of gay marriage dropped by around 23 percentage points. After the decreases, slightly over half of the respondents viewed these acts as wrong: 52.9% disapproved of gay sex, while 50.8% disapproved of gay marriage. Less than half thought it was wrong for gay couples to pursue adoption, surrogacy or assisted reproductive technology (ART), after disapproval of such same-sex family formation pathways also dropped.
IPS’ survey gathered responses from 4,000 citizens and permanent residents in 2024. For this study, researchers tracked moral attitudes on a variety of issues, comparing them across different religious groups and against previous findings in 2013 and 2018. Views on same-sex issues liberalised the most among the issues in the poll, noted study authors Dr Mathew Mathews, Hanniel Asher Lim, Dr Teo Kay Key and Dr Melvin Tay.
The researchers found a hierarchy of acceptance on same-sex issues that persisted across time. Gay sex attracted the most disapproval, followed by gay marriage, surrogacy or ART by gay couples and lastly, gay adoption. Notably, the gap between gay marriage and gay adoption narrowed from around 12 percentage points in 2013 to about 5 percentage points in 2024. "This indicates growing alignment in how respondents evaluate relationship recognition versus parenting pathways," said the study.
The researchers also noted that although gay marriage presumed intimacy, it drew less disapproval than gay sex. Same-sex family formation – adoption, surrogacy and ART – also tended to be judged more leniently than gay sex and marriage. "This pattern indicates that respondents assessed each item on its own terms rather than as a bundled sequence," they said. "Substantively, it suggests that moral reservations are concentrated on same-sex conjugal acts more than on same-sex relationship recognition or same-sex parenting."
The survey also showed a "substantial liberalising of views" on gay sex across most religious traditions from 2013 to 2024. However, "strong and persistent" disapproval of gay sex remained among older Muslim and Christian respondents, in contrast to “rapid liberalisation” among Catholic, Hindu and Buddhist youths, as well as Taoists and the non-religious as a whole. Across all religions and the non-religious, younger respondents held more permissive views than older respondents on gay sex.
The IPS researchers said that maintaining harmony in multireligious Singapore would mean “managing and valuing, not erasing, pluralism”. The state must facilitate dialogue on divisive issues and “keep the playing field legitimate for disagreement”, such that strongly held convictions could be expressed lawfully while minority views were not coerced, they said, adding that religious leaders had an important role to play, and so did the public. “A diverse society is lived, not merely legislated,” they opined, urging people to “argue the issue, not the identity” and to practise the "etiquette of disagreement", especially online.