A few years ago, a lot of people were calling for the Republican Party to drop the "social issues," and just focus on economics. Then Breitbart popularized the phrase, "politics is downstream from culture." Now, I hear a lot of talk about how we can't win the political battle if we lose the culture. So we won a lot of political arguments, but we'll lose everything now, unless we can turn back the cultural tide.
So it seems like the "social issues" are vital to a healthy politics.