I’ve read multiple books on 90s politics recently, and they have reminded me just how much “values” and “character” and “virtue” dominated public discourse back then. Conservatives used these terms very effectively to cudgel those to their left, who had supposedly helped create a Godless, anything-goes society. They browbeat “welfare mothers” as unvirtuous, fulminated against the horrors of same-sex marriage, and generally proclaimed that the freedoms unleashed by the 1960s were sending the country to hell in the devil’s handbasket. It was time, to paraphrase Billy Sunday, to take America to God’s bathhouse for a thorough washing.