In looking at this issue previously I've often thought about looking at the past through rose-colored glasses, but that's not the case.
What are some laws that have been changed by societal acceptance of new norms? Abortion is the obvious, but what about Sedition laws? People do things commonly today that would have landed them in jail for sedition as recently as the 1950s. We now have a former NSA employee who's revealed highly classified material and methods for bogus reasons, who is now being hailed as a hero by the left. When was the last time that you heard of anyone being charged and convicted of statutory rape unless they're some big-time, craggy-looking, 40+-year-old pedophile? Committing acts like burning the flag were once considered disturbing the peace and you were jailed, now it's protected freedom of speech. And look at punishments. How many people get passes on crimes now that would have landed them in prision for years back in the 60s and 70s? I remember members of groups like the Black Panthers being arrested and sent to prison for doing things that today's groups like Greenpeace, PETA, or Martin Sheen cronies do to get an hour in jail and publicity mugshots for use in fundraising. Back when I was a kid, you couldn't get a divorice unless you went before a judge and you'ld better have a damn good, and documentable, case for getting divoriced. Now the only purpose of the judge is to determine who gets what and who owes what... the divorice is now a given.
As for shopping on Sundays and Abortion, they compare in the fact that if you were to have gone to most people as late as the 1970s and said "you know what's going to happen in the future? On Sundays every store you can think of is going to be open, malls are going to be open, and you're going to be able to shop to your heart's content", they would have looked at you as being as nutty as if you had said "in the future you'll be able to get an abortion for whatever reason you want, whenever you want it, and there will be no social stigma attached." When I was a kid in the 1960s, the only stores that could be legally open were drugstores, and then only for filling prescriptions or selling medicines. You also couldn't get a legal abortion except in true cases of danger to the mother. That's not romantacism, it's fact.
So... has this made the country better? Stronger? Does the ability to go out in the streets and attack your nation's policies, or betray your oaths to your government or spouse, make us a better country? Some would say that individual freedoms are what's most important and say that we are better off as a country with freedoms of abortion, divorice, no regard for religion; and that we are better off without the blanket of moral judgements that religion imposes and if a 40-year old man wants to marry a 13-yr old boy, it's a free country! (I know the last example is a bit of stretch, but who in the 1960s and 70s ever thought there would come a day when gay marriage might ever become legal?) While I think that individual freedoms are great, the reality is that with rare exception we don't exist as individuals. We exist as members of a society, and being a member of a society requires that some individual freedoms be sacrificed for the betterment of the society. The Founding Fathers understood that, and enumerated a solid set of freedoms that every American should have for a good quality of life. It seems to me that they were on the right track as many of the "freedoms" added after the fact have done little more than drag society down.