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This is a moral/social issue, indeed. And conservatism is also about social issues. Conservatism is about conserving what we have.

Are you aware that one of the key steps in the subversion of a free nation is demoralization? Our Founders realized that if you have an immoral people a democratic form of government cannot survive. So whoever can rid a society of sound moral judgment and behavior can destroy that nation. And that has specifically been the plan of the communists for a very long time. There are many reasons for that, but I’ll just address a couple.

First off, if a person’s core beliefs about morality rely on human reasoning or interpretation, it is easy to just get the right person or interpretation into a position of trust and then the whole foundation of morality can be re-programmed. If there’s no such thing as natural law or objective truth, then people can set their own standards - which may or may not be sustainable or good in the long term.

Secondly - and this follows from the above - if you can take away a sound basis for morality and replace it with a broken one, you can destroy the foundations that work and thus create a crisis. The main rival to communism - where the government provides everything for everybody and thus also makes all the decision about everything - is the family. If families are providing for their own, there is no crisis for the government to step in and try to solve. That’s why the communists are pushing things that break the family - the “social issues” that are supposedly not relevant to government: promiscuity, drugs, divorce, abortion, homosexuality, pornography, etc. The end result of that is that people and families are broken.

Wanna know the leading cause of poverty? Single-parent homes. Sure, it was a personal moral issue when that girl decided to sleep with that guy, but now that we’ve got welfare - the public stepping in to care for people whose family situation doesn’t provide for them - who has really ended up footing the bill? How many young Black guys (for instance, as one demographic where marriage is considered irrelevant) do we have who put their sperm all over the neighborhood and leave you and me to pay for those kids and their mothers?

And as long as that is happening the rest of us are faced with a dilemma: Do we coldly let those people get the just rewards for their decisions - and let those kids starve to death, for instance? Or do we step in and help the kids, who didn’t deserve the situation they’re in?

You and I both know what the answer has been, and the only way it’s going to stop is if we either stop paying for their choices and let the kids suffer for the sins of the parents, or if people learn to make choices that are sustainable.

That’s where the rubber hits the road. Every “big government” issue we face comes down to the morality of the people that created a “crisis” that the government used as an excuse to step in and “fix”.

Right now the government would love to own my healthcare because if they did, they could tell me what I have to eat, how long I can sit rather than walk, and what I can read - because they are in effect my “parents”, the people who decide everything about my health because they are the ones who are going to pay for it all.

I love liberty, and I am not saying that it is the government’s business who you or I sleep with, what we eat, or what we read. Those are personal choices and need to remain so, or else we become just like the sharia folks. Which is what I hope you are trying to say as well.

But I do recognize that if people break the social foundations that have sustained civilization throughout the centuries, we will get BAD, BAD, BAD results both socially and in government. We will get a bunch of feral cats acting like animals in large enough numbers that they can vote to have everybody else pay for their choices. As a case in point, I present to you Sandra Fluke. It is a disaster in the making.

A person can say that they aren’t forcing anybody else to pay when they sleep around, as long as they either prevent pregnancy, abort any conceived children, or take care of whatever kids they allow to be born. But if the pre-marital sleeping around that they do ends up making them unable to make a marriage work and they end up divorced and in poverty, with their kids getting government assistance, we ARE paying for their choices even if they never realized their choices would cost the rest of us. Same thing with if they abort a child and because of the coping mechanisms they use to deal with that, they end up incarcerated (people who do ministry in women’s penitentiaries have said that the vast majority of incarcerated women began their descent into crime in response to an abortion).... that ends up costing us all.

You might think that a “narrow definition of morality” is from party-pooper “sanctimonious bluenoses” but the truth of the matter is that our finite vision doesn’t know what works in the long-term, or what has unintended consequences. The one who can truly know whether it hurts us to sleep around before we’re married is the One who made us, and who has observed all the history of mankind. The people you are calling “sanctimonious” are merely passing along the wisdom of One who knows what works and what doesn’t.

Fortunately for us, He also knows how to fix what is broken, and has picked up the tab for our brokenness as well - the very expensive price of His own Son. He loves us. We would be fools to walk away from that love.