So what? That was literally generations ago. People change, especially after 40+ years. A person's youth is a volatile time for crafting a worldview.
Pretty sure all of us know at least some older folks that were not the same people in their teens/20s and have differing views, crafted by their experiences in life.
People do change. I was a McGovern Democrat as a teenager, and a Vietnam War Moratorium protester before I could vote. I was the youngest member ever of my county's Democratic Committee when I was in high school, befoer I graduated.
That I have become a born-again Christian is NOT the reason I no longer identify myself as a Democrat. I am registered as a Republican because Florida requires party registration for primary voting, but I have voted Democrats in 7 of 10 Presidential elections, abstaining once (1980) and voting for the GOP twice (Bush 43 in 2000, McCain in 2008). The antipathy that the Democratic Party exhibits for conservative Christians doesn't help me with them, however.
The main reason is that the Democratic Party has rejected the idea that nuclear families make up the building blocks of civil society and are indispensible for liberal democracy to function as it ought to:
I firmly believe that many of the social policies the Democratic Party has actively advanced in this millenium are policies that actively undermine the seedbed for needed virtues. We have seen an explosion in single parent families, driven in no small measure by a welfare system that incentivizes NOT marrying and NOT gaining employment, but are those families seedbeds for "independence", "self-restraint", "responsibility", and "right conduct"? I am all for the safety net, and I voted for Obama in 2012 because Romney (and the dethroned Movement Conservatives) seemed willing to trash the safety net in its entirety for tax cuts, but there has been a dismissal of "family" as a mere wedge issue, and not the reality of family as the institution that makes liberal democracy possible.
The virtues I speak about don't just happen in societies. A look across the globe ought to confirm that, but some folks only see what they want to see. And the condition of families in many societies is not what it is (or, at least, was) in America; loyalty is first to tribe and warlord. Does that produce a society that serves the common weal? There are alternatives for the traditional nuclear family, but an alternative is not a substitute; often, it's mere "making do" because there isn't a better choice. Yes, we've had single mothers forever, but Ms. Whithead, whom I've quoted, points out that the main reason for this prior to 1950 was parental mortality. Today, it's other reasons, and it means that a huge percentage of kids are growing up in family units with at least one adult living in the household that is NOT the parent and whose vestiture in the child(ren) in that household is questionable. (Any family counselor will tell you that the single largest bloc of families they work with, if not a majority, is with blended families and problematic stepfamilies, which includes a parent having a sexual partner who is not the parent and is not married to the parent.)
There are many folks who are rightly divorced, who need to be divorced, whose situation was legitimately intolerable and toxic. There are many women who have become pregnant by men who were deceitful, who were not capabable of commitment, and who have been kicked to the curb. There is a difference, however, between folks who are in situations where they have been exploited or deceived and folks who had children or fathered children knowing that they were not going to be raising or supporting those children, and that is different. I don't want a government that regulates that behavior with a heavy-handed jackboot; except for abortion (which kills another human being), I DO want the government out of people's medical decisions. But I also don't want a political party that I might choose to call MY party to be passively OK with this, even if they know better, because of the demands of mass constituencies within that party to look the other way at how the fabric of our civil society is being undermined.
