If the words they post on their national party website are what is attracting their base, maybe we should look at that and see where there is common ground.
I am not trying to convert the whole party, just gain support of people there who do believe in less Federal government, in one which honors its Constitutional mandates and stays out of the rest of matters reserved to the people and the states.
As for "gay marriage", that isn't the government's business, it is a church matter (and no church I go to will support the idea). Government has no business in the marriage business anyway.
ANd as for the 'platform' items you listed, we are getting all that now with the Obamites in office.
Of course marriage is government business, people can’t just decide that legal marriage is whatever they want.
I don’t want homosexual marriages and Islamic polygamy made legal in the United States.
Churches do not decide what marriage is or else the Mosques and satanic churches and homosexual churches would be in charge of defining marriage in America.
That is why freerepublic exists, to fight that liberal agenda, including your "gay marriage".
The history of marriage suggests the state has long had a substantial interest in defining marriage sufficiently to be able to address the legal effects of procreative activity, such as paternity, survivorship, default rules of estate transfer, not to mention the legal and social obligations of raising children. That is why state marriage regulations have traditionally focused on heterosexual marriages; they are, by volume and by character, the most important source of the state’s most valuable resource, the next generation of citizens. Therefore, to the extent a state understands and values its own continuity, the state will naturally be concerned with the most natural context for sustainable procreation: Marriage.
As for Libertarianism, it has two basic flavors. One is more of a natural law, constitutional orientation, and the other more toward anarchy. I suspect the natural law camp has an easier time allowing the state to regulate marriage. Whereas the anarchistic would tend to revere individual autonomy as the supreme good and thus resist any such regulation.
Likewise, with abortion, the tendency to absolute individual autonomy, combined with a low view of the unborn child, tends to tilt libertarians toward unrestricted abortion. Our own libertarian candidate for governor, Lex Green, is so conflicted on the matter he says he is neither pro-life nor pro-abortion. Huh? Yet in reference to capital punishment, in the same radio interview, he said he was pro-life. Pro-life for capital felons, and “don’t care” about unborn children? That is tragically incoherent.
No, libertarianism may be a friendly force for free markets in theory, but its permissive nature on the social issues, if fully fleshed out as social norms, just makes our culture worse, more dependent on the state, and less likely to be able to sustain a free market. It is, IMHO, an inherently self-defeating system.
I vote for a traditional, natural law conservatism that recognizes both the rights of the individual and the beneficial role of government, at the highest level possible, in defending the rights of the recently procreated, whether it concerns the stability of traditional family structure that nurtures them, or the more basic issue of not being killed in the womb.