Love this post. I had had it in the back of my mind for a while to write up something on the same subject. I think about it often because I'm always interested in what the Founding Fathers would have to say about the hole we've dug ourselves into as a nation and one of the points they continually harped on was "Virtue."

John Adams said,

"We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition and Revenge or Galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." - John Adams, October 11, 1798.

And to me that's just intuitive. Freedom requires responsibility. If the people of a nation can't, or won't, restrain their own behaviors, eventually circumstances will become unbearable and everyone will cry out for a government to stop the madness.

But I think you make a great point in saying that legislated morality isn't morality at all; it's obedience. This is the great point on which I diverge from the Christian right, although I would consider myself both definitely Christian and mostly conservative, at least in the old fashioned since. The Bible talks about changing the inner heart of man, not simply his outward behaviors. If we focus purely on "results" not only will people fall short of the mark, many of them won't understand why that mark was set as a goal in the first place.