It's mental conditioning. Don't think, don't even ask questions, just repeat the State's mantras, otherwise you're a bad person. @taliakerch shared a cartoon that illustrates this perfectly:
For these people, my patience well is BONE-fucking-dry, so if I hear a pseudo-moralistic argument, I hit back with a moralistic argument of my own:
Good people do not need laws to do good acts. Bad people will do bad acts regardless of what systems may exist to constrain their behaviour. If the law is the only thing stopping you from doing something, you do not have a functioning moral compass.
Now then, I know you're a Christian, so this might annoy you, but I like to compare secular authoritarian apologetics to evangelical apologetics, because pointing out that they are no different from the people on the opposite side of their false dichotomy really pisses them off. Ray Comfort, one of the worst examples out there, once said something like "if it weren't for Jesus Christ, I'd be a murderer, and I'd be in prison," in front of Eric Hovind of all people. That tells me that Comfort himself has no internal sense of right and wrong.
There might be a few people who fire back with "false equivalence," but unless they can show how that's a false equivalence, then it's just a cop-out. Hell, half the time that I've pointed out the logical fallacies in their arguments, they just throw those same accusations right back at me, without explaining how those fallacies apply to my argument (I have a few examples, if you'd like to see them).
Another thing that you need to keep in mind is that not all statists are merely brainwashed useful idiots. Some are paid shills, and to quote Upton Sinclair, "it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it," a quote which is frequently mis-used to mean "if you don't agree with me, you must be ignorant, read my opinion until you accept it," (a three-for-one fallacy in itself, specifically a combination of circular reasoning, argument from authority, and ad hominem) when it actually means "if someone has a vested interest in believing something, they have a good reason not to change their mind."
!PIZZA