Libertarians have always been favorable to "the freedom to have a different sexual orientation"; it's not a "new" issue that was only discovered recently. However, conservatives and libertarians have always known that the freedom to live one's life as one desires can never extend beyond the point where others' freedoms are curtailed. Otherwise it's not actual freedom, but mere licence.
It's hard to answer because I'm not sure what you're asking, or why you are confused. The first and second sentence are describing libertarians' understanding of freedom as a value, and how this connects with "preserving existing values" to use GP's phrasing. It's quite wrong to say that sexual orientation "was not part of our culture in the past", as GP contends (unless you mean a quite remote past). If anything, it was understood in a far more nuanced way that always involved tolerance for others' orientations and value systems.
So, maybe I'm overthinking. Those two sentences read as if personal liberty is important, but LGBT marriage somehow impact others' personal freedoms. This is based on my knowledge that conservatives tend to be anti-lgbt marriage rights.
Maybe it's the grouping of conservatives and libertarians together. Maybe that's where my head gets lost.
Libertarians are complicated.. in my experience they have mix of liberal and conservative values.
Take private property as a canonical example. Private property is good from both liberal and conservative perspective, but for different reasons. Liberals like private property because it confers more freedom to individuals, while conservatives like it because of its hereditary nature, as a reward for being good manager. These are two different values. (Oh and BTW, Marx was one of the first people who pointed out this contradiction, if you reward capitalists with property for doing good, eventually you're gonna run out of it..)
Well, in the United States LGBT marriage was instated via an application and extension of customary law, not any statute from Congress or even any overt politics. I see this as being quite compatible with conservative and libertarian values, seeking to remove undue interference from personal lives as much as possible. I'm not sure why you would disagree. Progressive activists may see the political process as the only way of achieving "positive" change, but that's a short-sighted point of view.
That's what I'm saying. In the US, conservatives actively worked, and still work, against personal liberties in terms of LGBT marriage rights. That was my point.
People have different definitions of marriage. One person ‘defending’ one definition looks like ‘actively working against’ another definition.
E.g. in some cultures, by definition, a marriage isn’t valid without a male/female sexual act (the only kind that can lead to procreation, by definition). This axiom is held by over a billion humans for example.
LGBT marriage, at least in the United States, is a legal definition that need not have any bearing on how 'marriage' is understood in any other context. It came about purely as a legal hack, to address the needs of people who sought some legal acknowledgment of their stable companionship. The existing law and custom provides this wrt. "married" couples, and this was simply extended wholesale by sort-of pretending or establishing by fiat that two people can be 'married' no matter what their gender, as far as the law is concerned. It's a sensible mechanism that has plenty of other uses in law and policy.
Take any marginalized group. Call it group A. It is almost always the case that there are prominent advocates for group A, who profess (at least at first) to be pushing for equality for group A, but what they really want is special pleading for group A. The libertarian position is that equality is desirable; special pleading is not. The people who advocate for special pleading, once having dropped the pretense of being merely for equality, tend to argue that special pleading is now necessary to compensate for the centuries/millennia of oppression group A have suffered in the past.
I see your viewpoint - but I also think that you're confusing equality for moving the goalposts in some cases.
Take racial disparity in the US for instance, and the history of racial segregation and racist policies in government institutions. How do we address the inequality present in the current system without first addressing the root causes of that inequality; some of which stem from hundreds of years ago?
By your definition, that would seem to be special pleading, but it is not, in reality. It is attempting to address current conditions that were caused by past conditions. Or am I way off base?
Racial segregation and racist policies exist today; consider the state of policing and the criminal justice system in the U.S. as it affects minority communities. It's silly, wasteful and divisive to focus on speculative "root causes which stem from hundreds of years ago" when activists have barely even gotten started on addressing the actual, plainly visible causes and dynamics perpetuating current inequality. Clean your room before you think about changing the world.
That's not assuming good faith. Basically it's equivalent of saying that any complaints about discrimination are always dishonest, which is certainly not the case.
I'm actually more sympathetic than the average libertarian to marginalized groups, because social marginalization itself is a terrible thing and it seems hard to address without some sort of community-oriented focus that goes beyond conventional "libertarian" politics and its focus on mere individual equality.
However, I also thinking most advocacy is falling way short of acheving stronger community ties for marginalized groups. Indeed, a lot of such advocacy is clearly counterproductive, in pushing for "liberal" social atomization and further marginalization.
