Conservatives who get their information from the Rightwing message system don't understand the libertarian minimalist state, nor do they understand the Constitution, which protects everyone's beliefs, including Muslims and Homosexuals, provided those beliefs don't harm others.
(Republicans want a powerful state which imposes their values on others. They want to limit the freedom and full civic participation of groups they find evil, abnormal or otherwise inferior. FYI: these groups shift over time. Homosexuals are the flavor of the month.)
But they weren't always the flavor of the month. Conservative traditionalists (from both political parties) opposed the progress of blacks and women. To understand the disgust these people have for different value systems, research the reaction of Nixon's "Silent White majority" to the feminist revolution of the 60s.
The Rightwing czars of morality have an uneasy relationship to science, which is why they needed to create a massive institutional network of think tanks, which enabled them to tailor their scientific findings to their political goals. If science proves that human sexuality is an automatic response, the job of their think tanks is to show that it is a choice. They can get away with this because their voting coalition includes a block of people who have not had much advanced education, and so are quite vulnerable to the many charismatic pundits who seem to thrive on the Right.
Here is what many Republicans don't understand about the moral duty of the state to protect the sanctity of marriage. Government does not exist to save our souls. This is the job of individuals and families, in the privacy of their own lives. The sacredness of marriage doesn't come from the contract or the state, it comes from free individuals - individuals who are not told by bureaucrats what is good and normal, that is, individuals who are free to practice their own beliefs provided they don't harm others. The marriage contract is only a legal document that stipulates rights and obligations. Only a conservative could confuse a bureaucratic contract with a holy document.
Government exists merely to hand out and enforce legal contracts. We don't want a bureaucrat at the foot of every bed or hiding in every closet to make sure that each American practices the lifestyle and beliefs of conservatives. We want government not to care about our soul, our sexuality, our book purchases, etc. We want a minimalist state.
We want a minimalist state that doesn't play an activist role in morality or beliefs.
We want a minimalist state that hands out contracts and protects our right not to be harmed by others. We don't want Washington to legislate morality and impose a single set of values on all groups. We want maximum freedom for the maximum number of people.
Conservatives, on the other hand, want a big powerful government that imposes a single set of values on all people. In the 1800s they told us it wasn't natural for women to leave their domestic/biological destiny for public or civic leadership. We were told that women were too irrational to meet the rigorous mental demands of politics, and that they were more suited to being man's helper and providing a nurturing home.
Thank god we didn't let conservatives and traditionalists win that fight. Thank god we didn't let them define what was moral and normal behavior for women. [You get the picture right? Every generation of conservatives has a unique set of beliefs and values to be imposed by big government on the rest of us. They always find a group which is abnormal, evil or inferior, and who therefore deserves a lower status, with fewer rights]
Unfortunately, because the centralized power of Washington exists, we are still vulnerable to the centralization and violent imposition of a single value system, one that subjugates all outsiders to a singular system, much like communism, which itself limited a diversity of beliefs and practices for "the good of society".
God help us, because the Nazis were also driven by a very powerful conception of what was good and normal. Study eugenics. All it took was a massive economic downturn, which made the masses vulnerable to a charismatic leader promising moral renewal by expunging from the state all who were not pure.
God help us.
