Social conservatives are generally defined by what they refuse to support or pay for these days.
Abortion, they are against it and don't think government should be financing it here or abroad. Do the libertarians and freedom lovers here believe we should be financing abortion with tax dollars?
Nope. It should be neither outlawed nor subsidized. "Cheap, widely available, and rarely used," to paraphrase something I can't remember the actual source for.
Note - Virginia's newly-proposed anti-abortion law requiring the medically-performed rape of women for daring to seek an early-term abortion is completely unconscionable. Laws like this do "social conservatives" no favors, in the public's eyes.
Gay "marriage", they are against the use of government force to redefine an ancient word and institution, they are against shoehorning same sex couplings into an institution that has centuries of jurisprudence based on it being a union of a man and woman. There is no call to make homosexuality illegal or keeping them from pairing up into long term relationships. In our modern society I personally would not care if their bondings were given some type of legal sanction so that inheritance, possibly insurance and other relationship type rights are protected. A new legal framework that is designed from the outset to reflect the nature of same sex unions.
Do the lovers of freedom and liberty really support the Orwellian usurpation of a word and ancient institution by government fiat? We hereby declare marriage now includes man and man, woman and woman! Accept it or else!
Once again, it is resistance to the use government force to redefine an ancient word and institution, they are against shoehorning same sex couplings into an institution that has centuries of jurisprudence based on it being a union of a man and woman. Most social conservatives positions have even evolved on the issue so that legal/property/insurance concerns I've mentioned above are addressed. That a marriage does not make though.
Words do tend to evolve, in our language. What is your REAL objection to calling same sex marriages, marriages? Why does it MATTER?
Does Joe's marriage to Mark, or Cathy's to Karen, in *ANY* way damage your marriage to your wife? Doesn't damage mine in the SLIGHTEST. Let gay people suffer just like the straights!
You want my REAL opinion, as a libertarian, on the issue? Since the government -at *ANY* level - has no legitimate business interfering in or subsidizing *ANY* marriage, it ought to get out of straight marriages, leave them as moral and/or business contracts between two (or more) freely-consenting people, and add religious bindings to that if those individuals so desire. That's the way it OUGHT to be. But if it's going to shoehorn itself into straight marriages, it's got no business NOT extending the same coverage and subsidizing to gay marriages. Equal treatment under the law, and all that. Think we've got a Constitutional Amendment to that effect, somewhere...
Contraception, being tuned into the religious right for the last 20 some years I have never heard anyone seriously suggest we should outlaw contraception. I have heard plenty grumble about government picking up the tab for folks contraception. Do the liberty and freedom lovers here really think it is governments role to dispense birth control?
Neither dispense nor stand in the way of. If those in government have some religious-based (or other) moral objection to implementation and use of birth control, up to and including "morning after" pills, they can either sit on their objections or get out of government and protest like any other civilian.
(Looking hard at Santorum as I say that...)
Recreational drugs, the war on drugs is bad, this one will require a lot of work to educate folks on. Most are of the mindset drugs bad = make illegal.
Yup - sure will require a lot of work, in large part because so many are so very vocal about their mistaken belief, or outright lies, that those agitating for legalization are one and all stoner-wannabes who just want to lounge around and get high 24/7/365 at someone else's expense. Heaven forbid that many of us actually believe that it is the sole province of each individual to decide what he or she wants to put into his or her body (subject to freely-given informed consent, of course), and to be held fully responsible for the consequences of his or her actions while under the influence. Crash your car into a KFC because you were too stoned to see straight? Guess you're on the hook for some pretty expensive repairs and injury/death claims, don't come crying to me, you negligent bastard. Same thought process applies to alcohol, naturally.
I am convinced that if a nickel's worth of plant matter didn't cost a hundred bucks to purchase, and was available on the CVS shelf next to the Dayquil (or in whatever section might be more appropriate; BTW, credit for phrasing to Vin Suprynowicz), our "drug problems" here in this country would be a ROUNDING ERROR compared to the figures we've got going on thanks to the War On Some Drugs, and the current drug cartels would be powerless - indeed, would be out of freaking business. We MADE them into the global powers they are today, thanks to the War On Some Drugs. Guess we didn't learn a freaking thing from Prohibition I, we had to go and double down and try again.
ETA:
The reason for that perceived inconsistency is that birth control is only necessary if one chooses to be sexually active.* It's much easier to make the argument that government should not subsidize an elective, but if you say that some poor person should do without diabetes meds, suddenly far fewer people agree with you.
Given the very real physical and psychological health benefits of (healthy consensual) sexual activity, I would not actually regard it as quite so "elective" myself. YMM, perhaps, V. Why should we NOT make sex safer, more free of hazard and expense, given the capacity to do so? That's what humans do - we find ways to do new things, and new ways to do those things better. There's nothing wrong with having sex, at least consensually - why should we not make a healthy, natural activity better and more accessible?
Or do rich people simply deserve to be able to have more sex than poor people?
Neither my wife nor I want more kids than the two she already had - should we just not have sex, when humanity KNOWS how to deal with that particular issue?
Note that while it's a relatively-new development over the past several years, my insurance plans at my previous and current jobs cover ED drugs in the same manner as, say, blood-pressure or diabetes meds.
The wrinkle with birth control is that some forms of birth control are, or are perceived as, abortifacients. So while there will be no push to eliminate birth control as birth control, without a major cultural shift, there is at least some significant chance that some may try to have certain drugs proscribed or at least more tightly regulated.
It's all about where you choose to draw the line - and what makes where you draw it that much more "real" or valid than where, say, I do, or where the head of Planned Parenthood does?
An amusing side to this is how out-of-date some of the arguments are. People still talk about American men as if we were 19th-century farmer patriarchs, demanding that our wives give us a good crop before we finally allow them to die in childbirth, so we can find a younger model and repeat the process. Obviously, it doesn't work that way any more.
*Obviously some sexual activity is not consensual, but that usually leads us back to the abortifacient argument.
Lotta attitudes remain mired in the dark ages, so to speak.
