The Evolution of Morality Policy
By Sean Evans, Chair and Professor of Political Science
Jul 3, 2023 -
Fifty years ago, U.S. morality policy revolved around abortion, pornography, school prayer, and teaching evolution. Today, morality policy focuses on abortion, drag shows, gender-affirming care for minors, drug decriminalization, and school curriculums on race and sex. This shift toward progressive values combined with the nationalization of morality policy is changing how religious conservatives respond.
Morality policy involves one group using government policy to impose its values on everyone else. These policies reflect a clash of irreconcilable core principles (e.g., abortion takes a life v freedom to make reproductive decisions) and usually involve the regulation of personal behaviors. Naturally, people take these issues very personally which means people are willing to act politically to enforce their views.
Today, these issues are of equal or greater importance than economic issues in our national debates. Historically, national politics focused on economics as the two parties debated the size and role of government. In contrast, the state’s police power empowers states to protect the health, safety, morals, and welfare of its people which made morality policy a state responsibility. Yet, those who lost the state battles sought to overturn these decisions in federal courts. They argued these morals laws violated civil rights and civil liberties and that courts must step in because the democratic process is not responsive to minority groups. Thus, Supreme Court decisions such as Brown, Roe, Obergefell, and Bostock nationalized morality policy. This combined with more people focusing on self-expression and identity makes morality policy more important to more people.
The biggest change in morality politics is the aggressiveness of the left. The left starts every culture war because of their commitment to social justice. They perceive morals laws as harming others or being unfair and challenge the sexual or racial status quo. Due to the declining cultural status of conservative Christianity and the left’s belief that the US is becoming a majority-minority nation, social liberals are using legislation (e.g., Equality Act, Women’s Health Protection Act), executive action, and their control over corporate executive suites, educational institutions, and Hollywood to advance their agenda. Moreover, the left’s dominant social justice theory views groups as oppressors and the oppressed. This perspective makes it easier to marginalize people of faith and conservatives as bigots who oppose equality, and it seeks to privatize the faith of believers to homes and places of worship.
In response, conservatives are moving from a “moral majoritarian” approach that seeks to protect a community morality to a “cultural minority” approach that emphasizes freedom and rights. There is no longer a Moral Majority that can impose its religious-based ideas of right and wrong because fewer people see individual behavior in religious terms. Instead, conservatives are using parental rights, free speech, and religious liberty to build broader political support. Parental rights bills that require age-appropriate discussions of sex, curriculum transparency, and parental consent to change a child’s gender are popular. Laws and decisions that force religious conservatives to provide services for same-sex weddings would violate the First Amendment because it compels speech that is contrary to the speaker’s belief and are illiberal. Moreover, the First Amendment’s free exercise clause should protect religious minorities from the majority and provide some exemptions to generally applicable LGBTQ+ nondiscrimination laws.
The challenge of moving toward rights politics is that the most controversial cultural debates will feature competing rights which makes it more difficult to find acceptable compromises and makes a loss feel more threatening. The benefit of this change is that religious conservatives who have not always been supportive of minority rights are becoming more supportive of the free speech and religious rights of others. Moreover, using the language of rights appeals to more liberals, increases liberal support for conservatives’ position, and may make compromise easier.
This column appeared in the July 2nd edition of The Jackson Sun