I agree that absurdities like this have their roots in the public's demand for backward things, but this is made easy by the consolidation of power at the Federal level for things like this.
Imagine a world in which a concerned citizen contacted local or state level authorities with this sort of complaint -- it would not have the same sting of morality policing, in my opinion.
Conversely, imagine a world where concerned citizens could only contact local and state authorities about, for example, racial discrimination by the local and state authorities.
While the prevailing narrative is that Federal intervention in this sort of thing is beneficial, I think that if you adopt the view that morality is largely a function of economic progress, most of the moral progress enforced top-down is largely inevitable over a 5-10 year time horizon.
The same backward idea of causality that motivates neoconservative interventions in foreign governments motivates the aggressive use of Federal power to coerce lagging states into compliance.
Driving through impoverished areas of the US is like taking a time machine back 30 to 50 years. In my opinion it is fairly arrogant to assume that an impoverished region's morality ought to be in lockstep with an affluent region, when only a few decades earlier the affluent region was unabashedly worse.
The most harmful aspect of this is the idea that the average person in the affluent area is enlightened. By definition, the average person is never enlightened, he is simply average. Yet politically, the idea of a moral crusade is irresistable.
Imagine a world in which a concerned citizen contacted local or state level authorities with this sort of complaint -- it would not have the same sting of morality policing, in my opinion.