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There's a lot there. I read Red Family, Blue Family... partly I'm interested in how Lakoff's political work has stood the test of time. The vague impression I get from reading around is "not wonderfully". Of course, Lakoff's thoughts about families and politics go back to his thoughts about linguistics and concepts, and there's a line of ideas that can be traced back through Rosch to Wittgenstein about "family resemblance" categories, where you have collections of things which are all similar to each other but it's not possible to pick out a neat defining characteristic or formulate a nice Aristotelian definition. I tried explaining this to a friend once, she said "How are you defining 'family' here", and I said, "My point exactly! There can be two generations, or not, they can be blood relatives, not not, they can live in the same house together, or not, they can all love each other, or not..." and then there was a sidetrack as to whether family pets counted and whether a family dog could partake of a family's family resemblance. Anyway, Red Family, Blue Family seems to espouse one idea of liberalism but I found the "Blue" side of things didn't speak to me, and I found myself reaching for my J. S. Mill again to reassure myself that someone was on or near my wavelength. Also, it doesn't explain why libertarians generally side with conservatives.

I suppose, as well as there being awkwardness between family values and liberty, there are awkwardnesses to do with equality too, especially equality of opportunity. I think there might be equality issues with the concept of a family, too; if you take the sort of approach to definition that I'm taking then it's all too easy to end up with a middle-class heterosexual family as a prototype - some people find this unacceptable.

Thought sloshing around: "form-tracks-substance" and "substance-tracks-form". I suppose that some forms of "Negotiated Commitment" or related ideas might be described by the former, and that the latter might be how supporters of arranged marriage might describe their ideal.