I think there is a fundamental confusion about the role of government in many people's minds. The set of actions that government force should be used in response to is a vast subset of the set of all wrong actions. People seem to have this idea that the government exists to vicariously promote their set of morals, and all they have to do is convince enough fellow citizens of the validity of their morals in order to get favorable legislation passed.
This is _wrong_. The fundamental problem here is that people are mistaking their personal, subjective morality for the objective moral code that everyone must agree on for a free society. An objective moral code prohibits actions which bring measurable harm to another individual, and the punishment should be proportional to (and of greater magnitude than) the harm wrought.
Unfortunately, we have many laws which do not fit under that umbrella. One source of such laws is disagreement over where measurable harm begins. Another source is economic regulation – these laws are often necessary, but frequently legislate subjective morality under the guise of being primarily related to the economy. The biggest problem, however, is moral ambiguity. Moral crusaders/culture warriors seek to enact laws to promote their subjective morality, and use a posture of superiority or fear to convince others to at least not stand in their way.
However, even more difficult to detect than this is subjective morals that are held by a majority. It is very easy to fall into a pattern of group-think where the majority opinion becomes so accepted that it is regarded as truth, especially in a society where critical and objective thinking is often discouraged or even admonished. Confirmation bias is utilized as an excuse for not holding agreeable claims to a high standard of scrutiny.
It's similar to how Christians say “God wouldn't like that” or “Baby Jesus wouldn't do that” in reference to some non-harmful act. Actually, they are just judging you (using their subjective morality), and using their deity as a proxy so such a statement wouldn't seem as arbitrary and baseless as it actually is.
When subjective morals become codified into law, inevitably one of a few things occurs: a minority group is persecuted using that law as support, government is expanded further in order to enforce that law more effectively, or the law continues to be broken out of sight of the police, for example. Beyond that, the more subjective laws a society has, the greater probability of an individual breaking a law at any given moment; either because that individual didn't even consider that what he was doing could possibly be against the law, or because he feels the law is wrong and is defiant of it. Such laws open the door for selective law enforcement, since everyone is guilty of something – the police will just pick the most attractive targets to bring down. “Law and order”, a popular right-wing mantra, is actually undermined by excessively broad legislation, since people lose respect for the law when they break it doing something they do not regard as wrong.
Moral crusaders are spending lots of everyone's money to target groups of people they have demonized in one way or another, but of whom only a subset usually do anything that can be regarded as harm to another. They use the correlation between some action they dislike and a harmful action to justify outlawing the non-harmful action, or they even extend the definition of harm to extend to the individual harming himself through his own conscious choice. These laws undermine respect for the law, increase the power of government, increase the tax burden on the individual citizen who is paying for their enforcement, and ultimately undermine liberty by presuming to make people's personal moral choices for them.
Why does everything that is to be discouraged have to be a criminal act? Why not leave the job of determining the wrongful nature of acts that are not themselves harmful, and assessing the associated remedies, to civil courts where it belongs? Only acts of harm that are part of a direct causal chain with intent should be considered criminal acts. Furthermore, there must be evidence of harm. Where harm is claimed but cannot be determined objectively (i.e. psychological harm), there cannot be criminal prosecution.
In the name of being “tough on crime”, we have made some relatively very trivial acts into felonies, like drug possession or copyright infringement. Unfortunately, what many fail to consider is that many states have disenfranchisement laws for convicted felons. Is it really right to put someone in prison for an act that caused little or no harm, and then remove their right to vote against whatever politician was responsible? Mandatory minimum sentencing, three strikes laws, and asset forfeiture are all weapons of the culture warrior.
And this is assuming the states were able to be self-sufficient in their legal codes. I won't even get started on the federal government.
“Status quo” conservatives are simply people who have fallen for the slippery slope fallacy with respect to “social values”.