Is the culture war over? This week the Government proposed that gays should be able to marry — and barely a peep was heard from the moral minority. Yesterday the Tories came out with a thoroughly enlightened policy on addictive drugs. And the US Supreme Court has overturned the Texas ban on sodomy. Perhaps we are all liberal now.

Twelve years ago, I wrote a column in this slot arguing for legalising cannabis. At that time it was a shockingly taboo line, which must have caused some readers to splutter into their coffee. Now even The Daily Telegraph agrees. Gay marriage was a policy I once chose to champion on a Radio 4 programme when the producers asked me to argue a really contentious case. Now it is about to become law.

The ban on gays in the Armed Forces has been lifted and has vanished as an issue. None of the horrors warned of by its opponents has materialised. In fact, serving soldiers believe that it has worked remarkably well, much better than the American “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.

Yet it is not as if we are becoming wildly radical. This week, research for the Equal Opportunities Commission found that women no longer consider themselves feminists and are not that worked up about discrimination. “It’s far easier to shrug your shoulders,” said one respondent.

What we are now is a nation of shoulder-shruggers. With a few notable exceptions, which I shall come on to, most of us believe that the private sphere of life should be allowed to expand. What people do in the privacy of their homes, whether it involves sex, drugs or rock‘n’roll, should be their business. Even the issue of discrimination is dismissed as a private matter.

It is extraordinary how many taboos have evaporated in the past decade. You can buy hardcore porn videos over, rather than under, the counter. You can pose naked on an escalator in Selfridges. You can get married after you have children, rather than before — or not at all. Most mothers now go out to work. And nobody bats an eyelid.

The latest British Social Attitudes report shows not only that we are all getting more tolerant over time, but that younger people are getting more tolerant even faster than older ones. Of people born between 1960 and 1969, 17 per cent thought that homosexuality was not wrong at all in 1985, but 47 per cent believe it now: a rise of 30 percentage points. Among people born between 1930 and 1939, this tolerant position rose by 14 points. The oldest (over 80 now) have seen a rise of just 4 points.

But we are all shrugging our shoulders to a greater or lesser extent. And the same holds true for attitudes to cannabis. Support for legalising the drug has risen by 28 points among the under-60s. Among the over-60s, it has also risen, but rather more slowly.

These findings put paid to Tory hopes that young people will become more conservative as they get older. Far from it. They are getting even more liberal. And that means we are living through a real and lasting change in attitudes. As more socially conservative older people die, and baby-boomers and their successors make up an ever larger percentage of the population, liberal social values have become the norm.

In public policy, this has been accelerated by a split on the Right between moral majoritarians and libertarians. So, on the US Supreme Court, the liberal appointments tend to vote as one, and the Republicans now split between the libertarians (Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy) and the social conservatives (Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia). This gives, in many cases, a liberal majority.

It is the same in British politics. Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs are almost unanimously social liberals, and enough Tories now side with them to make the issues no longer a straight party political debate. Since Iain Duncan Smith’s gay adoption fiasco, and Ann Widdecombe’s ridiculous stance on drugs, the party has come to realise that it is now electorally suicidal to take a hardline stance on private social matters. It may win plaudits from elderly members, but it will alienate most of the rest of the population.

The exception to this general trend of liberalisation is, of course, much of organised religion, and particularly the Church of England. This organisation, which has thrived for centuries on the “don’t ask, don’t tell” principle, is now in paroxyms over the appointment of a celibate but gay bishop, Dr Jeffrey John. A letter in this week’s Church of England Newspaper illustrates the rabid extreme to which the argument has descended: its author accuses the mild-mannered Dr John of being a servant of Satan.

What is happening is that, as moral majoritarians become minoritarians, they are raging increasingly viciously against their lot. It is because conservative evangelicals feel that they are losing the argument in the C of E, which now has at its head a social liberal, that they are prepared to “out” gay priests, denounce them as servants of Satan and blackmail the bishops by threatening to withdraw their funds.

But the anger is not confined to conservatives. For in many other areas, the Left has lost the argument to the Right, and its supporters are equally embittered. The Labour Government, to the chagrin of its supporters, has accepted the free market, made friends with big business and refused to tax the rich. No wonder Labour MPs seized on a rare chance to engage in class conflict this week by voting to ban hunting.

And if the private domain is increasingly sacrosanct, the public one is becoming ever more regulated. New taboos are replacing old ones: now the Government says it is considering banning smoking in public places. Maybe it’s time for a culture war against the new bossiness. We will be able to walk down Oxford Street naked if a photographer deems it art, but God help us if we light up a cigarette!

maryann.sieghart@thetimes.co.uk

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