You have to understand the effect of Puritanism on America that continues to cast a pall over the country even today. There was a time when no mention of sex was permitted on the air. Even Lucille Ball was vilified for being shown pregnant on TV in the late 1950's. It may be hard to believe that this mentality existed in living memory, but it has continued to this day. One of the rules set out by the Federal Communications Commission in the US that controls all broadcast stations is that bad guys must never win. For a number of people in the US, anyone involved in sex with someone to whom they are not married is bad and must be shown to suffer consequences. This continues with all characters - Giles' lover dies, Willow's lover dies, Oz has to kill a fellow werewolf because she is trying to get him away from Willow, Xander's loses his virginity to Faith who tries to kill him the next time he goes to her place and his next lover (Anya) is killed, Buffy is prevented from marrying either of her paramours and Parker, the guy she shacked up with in university for one night, rejected her. Riley ran away after being unable to accept what she was but got married to a beautiful wife and has the only happy marriage in BtVS as a reward for entering a conventional marriage as was the Burkle's in AtS.
The US has never advanced past the mediaeval era in its concepts and laws about morality. The sexual revolution of the 1960's was propelled by the invention of the birth control pill and a number of people are behind modernizing American culture but they are opposed by the neocon religion (I refuse to call them conservative Christians - that is a contradiction in terms) which owns the Bible Belt, a large swath of America where ideas like sexual freedom are actively opposed both in the culture and in the law. Even now we have idiot pastors who claim America's losses in the oil wars going on in the middle east are caused by our acceptance of homosexuals (and the truth is, they don't like heterosexuals much better - they prefer asexuals). These pastors have protested military funerals and brought their idiot congregations with them because they say America is being punished for allowing gays to exist. This is equivalent to Buffy's first death and her second death brought by Glory is something he would have attributed to her acceptance of Tillow.
In answer to your question, nothing in American politics resembles Earth logic. America is orthogonal to reality about how people function and about basic freedoms. BTW Canada rates 6th in personal freedom and America rates 22nd in personal freedom in the world. Not very good for either of us.
