It depends on your personal priorities and values. The issues you are pointing to are mostly social factors. If it comes down to the voting booth I am quite certain that issues like gay marriage or choice are far less dominant than supporting competition and less government intervention, that (a long time in the past) have been core issues to the GOP.
Even I, being very dovish on foreign policy, am beginning to question this point when I see for example the current negotiations on the ITU Internet regulations. All this does for me is demonstrate, that values such as free speech and individual liberties are worldwide under attack, and almost entirely depending on America's strenth.
Well, if my choice of senator or congressperson helps make the difference between a land war in Iran or not, I'm going to have a hard time factoring in that legislator's support for copyright reform.
The bigger issue here though, the reason I'll go out on a limb and call copyright reform a fringe issue, is that it's supported by crazy people. For instance, in the "purported reasonableness" camp in the house, you have Darrell Issa, who has generally been a source of supported nods towards copyright reasonableness. Sounds great, right? But Issa is also a crazy hard anti-abortion crusader who has chaired panels in the house on funding for contraception and, recently, to give a new hearing to the vaccine-autism connection.
Single-issue voting is a great way to empower crazy people.
I guess the fringe issue is always looming in these situations. The SOPA discussion at least pushed it somewhat into the mainstream. But I agree with you, that many important issues are increasingly overtaken by the "crazy". I sometimes feel even myself, that trying to defending individual liberties and privacy is putting me more and more in a corner which is dominated by anyone between Richard Stallman and Alex Jones.
With a fair appreciation for the limits of my own insight on this issue and the immediate concession that reasonable people could argue about it, I respectfully disagree.
Even I, being very dovish on foreign policy, am beginning to question this point when I see for example the current negotiations on the ITU Internet regulations. All this does for me is demonstrate, that values such as free speech and individual liberties are worldwide under attack, and almost entirely depending on America's strenth.