Ironically, Conservatives made a deal with the devil when they courted the Religious Right in the 80's and now the only way they can win is to pander to the evangelicals by attempting to legislate their brand of morality. I would love to have the option of voting for a party that held to true conservative ideals, but they won't get my vote as long as they're ruled by evangelicals.
I heard about a teenage girl that was raped in study hall in a public school in Ohio. Once the teacher was confronted with the crime, her response was priceless. She said that it was not her place to teach the kids morality.
That pretty much solidified things for me. When you put children in public schools and are unable to teach them morality, you are still teaching them morality. You are teaching them that the state is amoral and that there is no real right and wrong.
Looking at teenage pregnancies, drug use, and other vices within public schools, it would appear that the secular humanist experiment with the nations youth is an abject failure.
Teaching kids morality is far more important than teaching them such things as to read and write. After all, if you are empowering children through education and they are immoral, you are simply empowering such immoral influences within a given society.
Moreover, if society become so immoral that it is comparable to the inside of a prison, then the state has no choice but to treat such a society as one big prison while taking away their freedoms in the process.
As Ben Franklin aptly noted, the Constitution will endure for a time until the moral fiber of the nation deteriorates and are incapable of such freedoms in a responsible manner. The only two ways to keep a civil society is for those within society to have internal checks and balances or have the state impose it upon you. It's really that simple.