After decades of losing ground, a new Gallup poll shows conservative views on sexual ethics are making a comeback. There is still much work to be done, however, which is why conservatives should not just retreat to private and charter schools. If conservatives want to win more hearts and minds, they are going to have to fight to have their voices heard in public schools.
According to Gallup data released June 9, Americans have become more conservative on many issues since 2020, including gambling, having a baby outside of marriage, birth control, and sex between unmarried men and women.
These numbers are historically monumental. They reflect a reversal of a trend away from traditional public morals.
As recently as 2008, the federal government encouraged the teaching of traditional morality in schools through the Adolescent Family Life Act, which was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Ronald Reagan in 1981. The law funded programs designed to promote chastity and abstinence before marriage.
President Barack Obama shifted away from this approach in 2010 when his budget eliminated funding for both the Adolescent Family Life Act and Community-Based Abstinence Program, which had funded abstinence-only grant programs in schools.
In the years following, Congress tried to regain some of the funding for the chastity and abstinence programs, but most of the funding instead went to “Sexual Risk Avoidance” programs that advocate “[avoiding] all the risks” of premarital sex, which eventually entailed providing education advocating forms of contraception.
With this history in mind, it’s no wonder that people overwhelmingly accept birth control as moral. It has been baked into our education system for at least two decades.
The recent Gallup polling makes the situation slightly clearer. As Americans trend away from supporting contraception and toward chastity, it is clear that the Right is not just winning the most recent elections in the country, but also the hearts and minds of the people.
In short, this data show that the Right is winning the culture war.
It’s not all good news, however. The same Gallup report found a gulf between what Democrats and Republicans find morally acceptable.
Whereas 90% of Democrats find contraception morally acceptable, 81% of Republicans would say the same. A more drastic gap lies between the 44% of Republicans who would call having a child outside of marriage morally acceptable and the 76% of Democrats.
The most drastic differences in what the Left and Right find morally acceptable, unsurprisingly, are on the topics of transgenderism and abortion.
Overall, the poll found that Americans are almost evenly divided on abortion. About 49% of Americans find it morally acceptable, with 41% calling it morally unacceptable, and the rest either offer no opinion or respond that it depends on the situation.
These data speak to a divided United States, which is not anything new. Republicans and Democrats have been increasingly at odds with each other over the last decade or so. The disagreements here are not about any implementation of the law, but rather on fundamentally moral grounds.
One of the original fissures in this partisan division is, as is clear from all the legislation about chastity, abstinence, and contraception, what is being taught in our public schools.
Republicans have grown so disillusioned with public schools that 15 of the 18 states with universal school choice laws are under unified GOP control. For many on the Right, the answer has been to help families escape the system entirely.
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The frustration is understandable. Fairfax and Loudoun counties’ schools have punished boys for objecting to transgender-identifying students in girls’ locker rooms, even when the boys were illegally recorded.
But after years of fighting for school choice, conservatives have too often ceded public schools to the Left’s ideology on transgenderism, contraception, and abortion. School choice is necessary, but not enough. If the Right wants to keep winning Americans over, it must take back the public schools, too.