William Barr

—Delivered multiple speeches in the early 1990s condemning the “permissiveness,” “sexual revolution,” and “moral upheaval” that he insisted had led to America’s decline. (More analysis of these speeches here.)

—Lead author of an op-ed praising former Attorney General Jeff Sessions for rolling back the enforcement of civil rights protections for transgender people and issuing a “religious liberty” memo claiming there’s no compelling government interest in barring anti-LGBTQ discrimination.

—Condemned church/state separation in public schools: “This moral lobotomy of public schools has been based on extremist notions of separation of church and state or on theories of moral relativism which reject the notion that there are standards of rights or wrong to which the community can demand adherence.”

—Insisted Georgetown University’s equal footing for LGBTQ rights groups was an attack on morality: “The second way in which secularists use law as a weapon is to pass laws that affirmatively promote the moral relativist viewpoint. Such laws seek to ratify, or put on an equal plane, conduct that previously was considered immoral…. Another example was the effort to apply District of Columbia law to compel Georgetown University to treat homosexual activist groups like any other student group. This kind of law dissolves any form of moral consensus in society. There can be no consensus based on moral views in the country, only enforced neutrality.”

—Bemoaned the attention shown “the homosexual movement”: “It is no accident that the homosexual movement, at one or two percent of the population, gets treated with such solicitude while the Catholic population, which is over a quarter of the country, is given the back of the hand. How has that come to be?”

—Led “a fierce struggle in which the Justice Department prevailed over public health experts” in maintaining the ban on people living with HIV entering the United States.