Christian conservatives, reflect on this point from the Book of Isaiah 64:6

All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags [the Hebrew is generally meant to mean menstrual rags]; we all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind our sins sweep us away.

Whenever I see social conservatives talk about promoting this or that latest "for the greater moral good" claptrap, I think about this. It's God's warning through his prophet Isaiah that righteousness apart from him will never buy mercy. Now, think about what happened the last time that humanity sought something of God's, together (as in "common good"), the Tower of Babel. Even if it is pure fiction, it is a cautionary tale. Together the two could easily be interpetted as, "I am the Lord, and you dare to conspire against me as a people to seek what is mine. For this, I will strike you down, divide you and set you against one another."
The first time, it was an attempt to seek the heavens so as to be a little bit like God, after having been cast out of grace. Now, many conservatives seek a grace and righteousness divorced from God and they call it the "common good." They do not mean that it is good to allow families and individuals to live free of violence and fraud, but that they should be strengthened through the state (usurping the Holy Spirit who sustains us in our weakness) and that virtue should be promoted while vice visibly punished for its own sake by the state.

The truest sign that it is an usurpation is that people like Rick Santorum who promote this agenda are operating through the state, and not to end the state's sovereignty over other social institutions. Families and churches are voluntary groups. One can leave either of them in most cases, but one cannot leave the state easily (sometimes at all). The voluntary institutions' health is the surest sign of the health of a society, and things look pretty bleak for the United States. That's why Christians who are concerned with the rise of depravity in all of its manifestations should be concerned with the way that people flock to the state, away from the voluntary institutions.

Fleeing to the state for these things is tantamount to fleeing away from God. Christian conservatives would do well to remember that God requires that each person freely seek him and that coercion cannot revive the institutions that are sacred in the eyes of God. Instead of legislating a false decency and fumbling through attempts to rebuild a battered and nearly destroyed family, how about pray for and work towards a community and individual-level renewal?