There has always been suspicion that the “social conservative” wing of the GOP came into being with the religious right’s disillusionment with Jimmy Carter and his administration. They flocked to the GOP to help elect Reagan and have been in the Republican party since. Many movement conservatives who pre-dated Reagan worried that this class of voters believed, like the liberals, that government would be a fine place to address the various perceived moral failings of the American citizen. The founders of the conservative movement in this country had no truck with authoritarian moralists who allied with government to impose additional controls over our lives, and still don't.(Read Kirk, Buckley and Goldwater) I think a Church that can not move people to right through moral persuasion has no business trying to do so through force using the police powers of the State. A large chunk of the conservative base will reject that attempt. Myself included.
Blue laws are an insult to a free man...whether he be a preacher or a hooker. A nanny State is a Nanny State...something that both liberals and social conservatives seem to desire.
Oh please. Spare us the libertarian claptrap. Of course vigorous enforcement of drug laws is consistent with small, limited government. The idea that drug abuse is wrong is part of our conventional morality. Enforcing that morality is a core function of government. The proper allocation of that responsibility between state and federal authorities under our constitutional scheme is another question. But for practical purposes, the Supreme Court resolved that question decades ago. The War on Drugs doesn't involve anyone using the law to move society to the right or to move it anywhere at all. It is an effort to maintain cultural norms without which we can't maintain liberty. The persistent libertarian failure to understand this is downright infuriating. Government has to maintain the moral infrastructure of a free society. If it doesn't, you won't have liberty, you'll get a totalitarian state. It's as simple as that.
To return to my initial point — the author is an idiot.