In 1967, as governor of California, he signed the furthest-reaching liberalization of abortion in American history. In 1969 he introduced no-fault divorce statewide with his Family Law Act. By the time of his campaign for the presidency in 1980, it would have been fair to say Reagan had done more than any politician of either party to build up the institutions of post-feminist sexual liberation. Reagan’s stress on “family values”—a strange term that was being used twice as frequently by the end of his term as it had been at the beginning—disguised his acquiescence to modern ways. Values were
...more
