The politics of the last quarter century in the United States cannot be fully understood without reference to cultural–religious issues such as abortion, prayer in the state schools, school curriculum including sex education and teaching the biblical account of creation, gay rights, gun control, the death penalty, and the proper roles of men and women. Cultural–religious conservatives defend traditional values such as patriarchy and sexual abstinence for the unmarried, while cultural–religious liberals challenge them. For example, the opponents of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) objected, not to its guarantee of formal legal equality which was uncontroversial, but rather to it potentially changing gender roles. While the New Deal party system had been founded on a conflict between economic liberalism and economic conservatism, recent contemporary US politics also contains an explicit cultural–religious dimension. Although they have not replaced the older economic issues associated with the New Deal party system, cultural–religious issues coexist with them and have transformed the contemporary US political agenda by disrupting older coalitions and creating new coalitions and cleavages.