By your logic anyone who does not support the United Nations having binding legal powers to force the entire world to allow gay marriage, and the means to enforce compliance, is anti freedom and anti gay.
freedom is partly self determination. not having laws stuffed down our throats by Washington is freedom (it could be marriage today, but more anti drug laws tomorrow)
Know how much gay people marrying each other affects your life, if you're not gay and have no plans to marry someone of the same sex?
Zero. It doesn't affect you. Whether gay people marry one another doesn't affect a lot of the people who oppose gay marriage, because it's an entirely private matter.
Apply the same for a lot of other issues.
If you're a business owner, and enjoy the benefits the law gives to business owners, then you play by a slightly different set of rules; you don't get maximal freedom to choose your customers, you have limits in some general ways once you open a business to the public. That set of rules changes from time to time.
If Rand Paul was to have his way entirely, his stance would be for the government to stay out of marriage altogether, straight or gay. That is to say, Rand Paul does NOT oppose gay marriage, he oppose marriage being a LEGAL CONCEPT at all. You should be free to call yourself being married to anyone, and you don't need any recognition to do that.
Now, of course he won't get his way with that, so the next best things is to localize the effect of the law: if you dislike the law of where you're staying, it would be a lot easier if you can just move to the next city with a different set of laws that you agree with. That's basically the overarching ideal of libertarian: liberty and freedom of choice trumps all. There aren't much to choose if the law is federal (or if it's Earth-wide, to take to the extreme). In the US, that would for practical purposes mean advocate for State law over federal law.
There are many things to dislike about libertarian and Rand Paul (his version of libertarian is kind of Objectivism, which is quite ugly). But to characterize Rand Paul's stance as "opposing to gay marriage" is misleading. Calling him "opposing to X", with X being some perceived good thing is (most of the time) attacking a strawman. He's pretty much just opposing to making more law, in general.
Edit: you said that "It absolves him of the responsibility of taking a stand on any of those issues" in one of the comment above. Yes that's the whole point of his ideal: it doesn't matter what his stance is, you're free to do whatever you want.
> That is to say, Rand Paul does NOT oppose gay marriage, he oppose marriage being a LEGAL CONCEPT at all.
No, he believes that marriage contracts (LEGAL TERM) should be available for same sex couples.
He also believes that legal issues (like tax codes) should not mention marriage.
To make an opinion, as someone who firmly supports equal rights for all Americans, regardless of gender or sexuality (or any other dimension), Rand Paul is not someone I support.
freedom is partly self determination. not having laws stuffed down our throats by Washington is freedom (it could be marriage today, but more anti drug laws tomorrow)