NEW YORK — Get out of our bedrooms.

If there was one unequivocal message delivered as the Republican candidate Mitt Romney was rejected and President Barack Obama re-elected, it was that Americans do not want politicians meddling with their sexual orientation, the right of gays to marry, or women’s choices over reproduction.

They particularly do not want white male Republicans invoking religious faith to theorize about the nature of rape or whether pregnancy following such violation might be God’s will. The country-club crowd, almost all white, who gathered around Romney at the last needs to learn a basic lesson of this vote: The United States has moved into the 21st century when it comes to sexual mores.

The shift has been rapid. In 2004, the Democratic candidate John Kerry lost as Republicans managed to fire up the evangelical turnout by using gay marriage ballot initiatives. Any candidate’s approval of gay marriage looked like political suicide. Eight years later Obama endorsed gay marriage in an election year and, despite a faltering economy, he won.

In the Facebook age, there was often no quicker way to get “unfriended,” than declaring support for Romney, even if that support was over economic rather than social issues. The choice, whatever its motive, could easily appear as a personal attack on the gay and lesbian community, as well as all the Generation Xers and Millennials for whom targeting someone’s sexual orientation just seems so 20th-century — an unacceptable holdover from another age.