Don't understand this obsession with controlling other people's bodies (and lives) or screwing them without hot slippery bodily contact.
Originally Posted by austxjr
On average, and accepting that there are always statistical outliers, sex is the second most powerful instinct following survival. It could not be otherwise or natural selection would make it so. Controlling sex, survival and reproduction are the cornerstones of controlling a society. Those in power need not even consciously understand this. Conspiracies are superfluous. All freedom stems first from sovereignty over one's own body. A serf or slave or prisoner is denied freedom by denying their autonomy. Any attempt to cement control over a large populace must include an attempt to delinate what individuals may and may not do with their own bodies, irrespective of whether it effects the liberty of others around them. In short, politicians rise or fall depending on how well they can raise opposition for unpopular lifestyles, and they always have.
RALPHEY BOY's observation notwithstanding, in a democracy voters will vote for the values they are either taught or learn on their own. Voter turnout is consistently highest by nontrivial margins among older citizens and immigrants. Both those demographics have been, on average, exposed at young ages to cultures with less liberal values that present-day America. They therefore skew towards more traditional values. Religion is merely the lever used to motivate voters. No separation of Church and State can hope to police their personal beliefs. The only long-term way to ensure that no one moral doctrine crushes all others is to inculcate in the people a lasting love of liberty. America's Founders included the Establishment Clause in the First Amendment not because they were not themselves without faith, or because they were particularly progressive, but because they or their recent ancestors had fled from religious persecution in the Old World, and so they understood the risk of allowing any one ideology oppress all contenders through the force of the State.