Quoting russell@coker.com.au (russell@coker.com.au):
I should have just said "Libertarians" instead of "Libertarian party" when referring to the legalising of child porn.
Libertarianism aims to be a logical consistent way of running society.
I tend to think in operational terms, and the USA Libertarian Party seems to have only erratic and inconsistent adherence to any specific theoretical framework for 'libertarianism'. The latter term is so ill defined in USA political discourse that a slightly different term, 'civil libertarian' arose in contradiction, meaning someone protective of fundamental liberties. But in contrast, 'libertarian' (in USA discourse) is just a political football and means any of a variety of rather different things depending on the speaker. And most _particularly_, the biggest problem about talking about small-L libertarians is that it becomes an all-purpose vague descriptor for anyone who favours more freedom of action in any area. Thus, it's basically meaningless. As to political parties, it is in my experience more useful to classify them according to what they _do_ rather than what they profess to believe, for lots of reasons including the professed beliefs often being given only lip service. Unfortunately, it is difficult to judge the USA Libertarian Party by that metric, because to my knowledge its candidates have won exactly zero national offices, and only a few hundred state and local ones in its entire history. Of course, it can be equally objected that it's not clear what the two _major_ USA parties stand for. Of the two, the Republican Party is the one that's always stood for an ideology, though the ideology it stumps for has changed repeatedly and drastically over its 162 years. By contrast, the Democratic Party (mine) really has never had a unifying ideology. It's always, over its 188 year history, been a disparate coalition of interests, some of them sectional. But anyway, _no_ party in the USA, major or minor, has ever endorsed legalisation of child porn, and it doesn't signify what you feel is the logical extension of any of their programmes.