The general value change increased the politicization of morality issues on the German political agenda, including questions on life and death as well as on the societal role of women. Stimulating fundamental value conflicts, these issues represent new challenges for decision-makers as most often there exists no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. But what unifies the actors of the different conflict coalitions and what does this imply for the conflict resolution?
According to Engeli’s et al. (2012) concept of ‘religious vs. secular world’, we would expect for Germany that morality conflicts are dominated by a religious-secular divide due to the existence of a strong Christian Democratic party. By investigating different morality policies that touch the gender issue to a different extent (prostitution, stem-cell research and same-sex partnerships), we show that the religious party cleavage is not only cross-cut by religious denomination and individual religiosity, but also by gender.
