Zed,
"I am anxious for SOME moral code to be applied to governance."
Whose moral code?
Of course laws reflect moral judgments. Laws about murder, theft, fraud, abuse, and many others rest partly on judgments about right and wrong.
But that is different from government adopting a particular religious or moral code and imposing it on everyone.
After 250 years, many of the broad rules necessary for an orderly society are already part of our legal system. What we are increasingly arguing about now are the harder questions where legitimate values conflict, individual rights collide, and reasonable people disagree about what government should be allowed to force on society.
Legitimate and perceived rights increasingly overlap and conflict. That is where constitutional boundaries become much harder to navigate, and where the courts are often called upon to determine whether government has crossed those boundaries or whether one person's claimed rights unlawfully infringe upon the rights of another.
And that is exactly why I resist the idea that either conservatives or liberals should become the nation's moral standard-bearer.
My moral beliefs guide me. How I conduct my life is between me and God.
They do not automatically give me the right to make everyone else live by them, nor should anyone else's moral beliefs automatically be imposed on me.
