The Federal trial began today on the constitutionality of California’s voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage, also known as Proposition 8.

Not being a legal scholar, I don’t have a specific position on the proposition’s constitutionality. It would seem to violate the equal protection clause, but I imagine there are clever defenses for every argument the claimants can put forward. My interest is more in the public policy aspects of this issue than the legal ones.

My view, simply stated, is that the government should not be in the marriage business.

Traditionally, marriage is a social contract; an interpersonal agreement that often has a cultural tradition and ceremony attached. No part of that formula warrants government involvement. Even among opposite sex couples, I don’t know why we accept that the government can tell us who we can and cannot marry, and even requires us to have a license to do so. This is a personal and private matter, much like any other agreement between individuals, and it has been throughout most of human history.

Legal marriage (sometimes called civil union) is another case entirely. Legal marriage confers certain rights upon the parties involved. The government has legitimate interests in regulating legal marriage; for instance, preventing people from entering a contract without proper consent, public health concerns, protection of minors, and guarding the rights of the infirmed or incapacitated.

Unfortunately, the two types of marriage have been conflated in our modern vocabulary, likely because most people undergo the processes simultaneously. Marriage ceremonies are often overseen by religious leaders, who are also empowered by the state to validate the legal contract. This has led to our current set of laws which cover both personal and the legal marriage, but they are not the same thing.

There’s nothing wrong with the government regulating a process that grants the parties a certain legal status and confers specific rights upon them. The problem is, the government goes much farther than that.

Everything from unemployment benefits to how much taxes we pay is affected by whether or not we’ve chosen to enter this particular kind of contract, and the people who have chosen not to do so are often discriminated against under the law. Furthermore, there is no good evidence that these benefits for married couples end up benefiting society as a whole. Despite the divorce rate being over 50 percent, the government continues to incentivize this particular behavior. It’s a kind of social engineering and it has no place in the land of liberty.

All that being said, the reality is that the government is almost certain to remain in the marriage business. Years of tradition are difficult to unwind and the people rarely regain rights once lost, no matter how illogical the resulting restrictions are. But if the government does continue to determine who can or cannot be married, it absolutely must grant that right equally to all persons. Anything less denies the ideals of liberty upon which the nation was founded.

Those ideals have not always been lived up to. There was a time when it was a crime in most states for a mixed-race couple to wed. The arguments that led to such restrictions were very similar to the ones being used to ban same-sex marriage today: it’s sacrilegious, it breaks tradition, it’s detrimental to any resulting children, it’s harmful to the fabric of society, it devalues the institution of marriage. All of those contentions turned out to be bogus, and some of them downright insulting. Nobody who wants to pursue a traditional marriage today is in any way prevented from doing so, or likely to find that path less fulfilling, just because some other people who don’t happen to look like the traditional couple are doing the same thing. More importantly, it’s not the government’s job to protect us from what we might feel if another citizen takes a certain action.

In the end, both sides in this legal battle will spend thousands of hours and millions of dollars trying to get the government to tell all of us which limitations on our personal life choices are acceptable, when in truth, the government really has no business making that determination in the first place. Our lives and choices belong to us. The essence of liberty is that we all get to make those choices, whether or not our neighbors like them, and we in turn grant our neighbors the same level of tolerance for their choices.

Once we start making decisions for everyone else, and using our government as the means to enforce those decisions, we’ve shifted from a society that protects individual rights to one that promotes the tyranny of the majority. Even if 99 percent of the people vote to deny rights to the other one percent, that doesn’t mean the 99 percent have a morally justifiable position. To paraphrase one of my favorite quotes, “democracy has to be more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what’s for dinner.”