The Hays code? The Hays code was instituted by a trade association, not the GOP.

You know the Hays code is named after Will H. Hays, right?

Hays was chairman of the RNC, campaign manager for republican president Warren G. Harding, and postmaster general under Harding. Not just any Republican politician, but a leader in the GOP.

Yes, its nicknamed after him because he was the president of the organization now known as the MPAA when they developed the Motion Picture Production Code. That he was also a Republican politician is mostly beside the point; the modern left-right alignment of the parties and the particular association of Republicans with the religious and “family” groups to whose concerns the code was a response wasn't a thing in the 1930s.

Hays was a republican. And also president of MPAA. That one republican worked towards the Hays code is not evidence that the GOP as a whole desired it.

Personally, it seems to me to be a code developed at a time of differing cultural values, that likely would have been supported by any mainstream politician.

The Hays Code was instituted by a trade association responding to pressure from religious and family groups of the type that are now a key section of the GOP base (at the time, they were not particularly associated with the GOP because theb first half of the double overlapping partisan realignment—New Deal + Civil Rights—that resulted in that association had only just started.)

At the time, the religious group being responded to (Catholics) were solidly democrats. Catholics have been solidly democrat until 2016. There is no way you can blame the GOP for Catholic behavior.

> There is no way you can blame the GOP for Catholic behavior.

There's no way you can meaningfully associate the modern political parties with pretty much anything of the 1930s, because aside from the names, little is the same about the parties. You could blame the Hays Code on pressure from Catholic social conservatives, and observe that that is now a GOP constituency, but how meaningful that is depends very much on what you are trying to get to from it.

> Catholics have been solidly democrat until 2016.

No, they haven't; they’ve been split roughly evenly between the parties for much longer (this data only goes back to 1992, and shows it true the whole time):

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2016/09/13/2-party-affi...