“They are willing to side with statism because they hate them less than social conservatives.”
I don’t agree with much else you have said on this thread, but you are absolutely right on this when it comes to the people who make the Libertarian Party go. That’s why they can’t get more than a couple of percentage points of the vote. They HATE Rand Paul for being pro life, and wanting to put troops on the border, and opposing gay marriage.
The libertarian party represent true libertarians, the smarter libertarians want to take over the GOP and make it a part of the liberal DNC, except with conservative economics.
We can expect to see more Romneys, and rinos in the future.
The problem is that they are kneecapping us on important issues like the preservation of marriage - they oppose the constitutional protections when it opposes the things they want, and then they refuse to act against the intervention when the statists impose things.
It’s like a rachet that slides only one way. We saw plenty of them here champion the campaign to remove DOMA, while other folks (like myself), warned that we’d see ‘instant immigration visas (which surprise surprise they like) for gay ‘couples’.
They would rather see the eradication of marriage licenses in society altogether than admit that maybe, just maybe, they are wrong about the connection between laws and society. Even in saying that marriage is a private good seems like a decent argument until you get to the questions like, “how then do we regulate bigamy?” “does a wife have a right to know if her husband has another wife”? “Does a child have a right to know their father and mother”, “should we issue visas to people who claim to be married, but arent”, and we see the libertarians strangely silent. It’s as if they believe that once they eradicate marriage altogether that the consequences go away.