First off, Kristoff's article in the New York Times from the 21st of this month is a great read, and you can catch it here. It goes over the different dimensions by which we can view someone's value system, and begin to understand where liberals and conservatives diverge.
“The Righteous Mind,” by Jonathan Haidt, a University of Virginia psychology professor, argues that, for liberals, morality is largely a matter of three values: caring for the weak, fairness and liberty. Conservatives share those concerns (although they think of fairness and liberty differently) and add three others: loyalty, respect for authority and sanctity.
Haidt describes himself as a centrist who was formerly liberal, and gets into a pretty fun analysis of the difference in the way people prioritize their values. At first though, I thought that the fact liberals only really focused on three categories while conservatives thought about six made it seem as if liberal morality was somehow more shallow. Conservatives have extra dimensions and have to juggle a lot in order to come to a decision on whether something is moral or not. I'm sure my Opus Dei conservative Catholic associates would love to lecture me about how I'm an immoral liberal, but I thought about this fact some more, and saw that it accounts for a lot of what goes on with people like Santorum, Inhofe, and a lot of other far right Christian evangelical pastors and politicians, as well as many on the far right in general.
Take LGBT issues for instance. For liberals, this is extremely simple: the ability for same sex couples to marry and have the same rights and privileges as heterosexual married couples is fair, grants greater freedom to the same sex couple to increase their liberty, and gives a battered minority the rights it should have had in the first place for fairness. Slam dunk right? Well, if we add the confounding layers of sanctity and respect for authority, then we get all sorts of insanity. Why do we not allow people to marry based off of a sentence in Leviticus and Corinthians, and a unverifiable fable about angelic beings being sexually assaulted and then later consumed with flame? Because it's written in a book that we have to believe is the word of a supreme being that we have to be loyal to, lest we lose it's favor or be punished. Not doing so would result in our society losing it's sanctity and goes against the ultimate authority. This is the undertone of so much of what comes out of the anti-same sex marriage coalition. They try to use facts and figures in an attempt to legitimize their view, but at its basis, they believe they are defending society from moralistic failing.
So in the end, I don't feel any less morally sophisticated than conservatives. In many ways I think my morality is more humanity-affirming and realistic. I recognize that authority is ultimately human. I don't care if the Catholic church has been an institution for 2,000 years; it's a human endeavor and is just as imperfect as the homo-sapiens who run it. It has great points and it has not so great points throughout the entirety of its history, and the more I read about it the more I am convinced. My belief in using government is not because of the government's authority, but because I feel certain problems are so large or require a large scale reordering of the entire system that disparate, private interests might not have the incentive, money, or organization with which to provide an adequate response. However, now I understand why conservatives are so given to ridiculous fear mongering over "death panels" and other such non-existent boogie men: we're threatening to institute a new authority they do not understand, and to show fealty to that is terrifying. Can't say I don't empathize.