Laws and morals are both normative claims about the actions of individuals, but while morals are concerned with individual actions, laws must be concerned about societal-level ramifications of not just the actions, but also the enforcement of law. For example, most people would agree that adultry is bad and immoral. But as a society we've decided that its immorality isn't sufficient to overcome the ills of being punishable by the state, and thus it ought not to be illegal. Stealing to feed your starving family is moral, but we don't want to support theft in general so its illegal.

In a free society, one must recognize that legality ought loosely follow morality, with the ideal being that illegal actions are the strict subset of immoral actions which cause greater ill than the enforcement of their illegality. In the absence of an oracle into objective good and evil, a society must err on the side of not making things illegal which could potentially either be not worse than the ill of their enforcement, or not be immoral at all.

The all-to-common trap is to confuse the direction of influence: morality should influence legality, never the other way around. Allowing legality to influence one's perception of morality is simply surrendering your autonomy to those who greatest influence the law, and is a sure-fire path to authoritarianism.

This should be read at every US Federal and State legislature session, every day.

Ignoring this allows the term “culture wars” to define our politics - which is precisely the end of a “melting pot” society

This is an absolutely fantastic post.

I think the difference is that the totality of morality is supposed to come from the state in Fascism.

A well functioning society necessarily ought not legally forbid things that I consider immoral, which allows for personal autonomy with regards to ethics.

I think that would be better stated as in totalitarianism, the totality of morality is supposed to come from the state. Fascism is only one form of totalitarianism.

The issue is in the word "merely".

Of course the goal of law writ large is to engender "good" conditions in a society by restricting "bad" elements and encouraging "good" ones. In this sense the law has a moral quality.

Roughly speaking, "law" is morality as practiced by a state. The difference is in the acknowledgment or ignorance of the laws' congruence with the moralities of the citizens' opinions and preferences those laws are meant to represent. One could say the entire goal of democracy is the messy process of aligning the state's morality with the collective morality of its citizens. Fascism is then comparable to defining a single normative moral position and imposing it on the entire populace unilaterally.

In short, the question is: whose morals?

Many laws are just mechanisms for coordination and organization of society. In the U.S. it's illegal to drive on the left side, and in the UK, It's illegal to drive on the right. Which side you drive on isn’t a matter of morality. However, knowing that everyone else is going to drive on the right (or left) keeps traffic flowing and reduces accidents.