Church and Australia's same-sex marriage

So it looks like Australia will shortly be allowing same-sex couples to marry. Julia Baird writes a great article about this, which is more about the church than it is about marriage.

She finishes with this advice for those now confused "about the place of Christianity in the public square":

"It might be time to get back to that old thing, what is it again, that book... the Bible, in which there are more than 2000 references to poverty and a scant handful to sexuality. It might be time to closely examine the true preoccupations of Jesus (who reserved his harshest words for Pharisees and publicly pious Church leaders) – greed, selfishness, lack of love. It all boils down to love, he said. Funny that.

Earlier she contrasts the statements of major church denominations with the beliefs of people in the pews - including leading politicians from different parties. She also notes that even Martin Luther King saw this kind of thing coming as far back as in 1963. Some of his words were very prescient:

"Is organised religion too inextricably bound to the status quo to save our nation and the world? If today's church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the 21st century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust."