"The foundation of national morality must be laid in private families. ... How is it possible that Children can have any just Sense of the sacred Obligations of Morality or Religion if, from their earliest Infancy, they learn their Mothers live in habitual Infidelity to their fathers, and their fathers in as constant Infidelity to their Mothers?"

--John Adams

The Founding Fathers wrote extensively on the need for a moral electorate. Because a moral electorate would not vote for immoral representitives.

What they didn't understand (or perhaps quietly feared) is that a moral electorate could be easily seduced or cowed when when an immoral minority wraps evil in the cloth of virtue. That's because standing for a greater moral good is much more difficult than accepting people living like animals.

Just ask the Romans.