The entire gay marriage debate, intensified by the California legislature's approval of a bill granting licenses for homosexual marriages and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's plan to veto it, misses the big picture. The real question is: Why is government licensing marriages in the first place?

If two people wish to consider themselves married, it is not the government's proper business to deprive them of that choice.

But the government should also avoid defining marriage in a way offensive to traditionalists — or to those who would like to see the custom made more inclusive. People should be free to associate as they please and to regard others as married or not, depending on their own conscience. The political controversy only exists because the state has butted in where it doesn't belong.

Marriage is a personal matter between consenting individuals. It is in many cases religious, but in no case should it be political. The state should not license marriages with a preference for one lifestyle or another. It should not define marriage as "between a man and a woman," as some conservatives want, nor should it define it more broadly, as some liberals want. Government should instead be divorced completely from the institution of marriage.

For a long time, this was the way it was in America. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, marriages were free from state sanction, conducted by churches and within communities and not by bureaucrats and politicians. Licenses were introduced in the mid-1800s as a way of regulating interracial marriages. One and a half centuries later, looking at the staggering divorce rates, state regulation clearly hasn't made marriages stronger or more sacred. One wonders why anyone would want to preserve marriage licensing, considering its ugly origins and unimpressive legacy.

Despite the distracting arguments we hear these days, the state's practice of granting permission for people to marry is anti-religious and reactionary. It seeks to replace the traditional role of the church with the authority of the state, all while laying claim to personal relationships as the domain of the government. It's a mystery why people aren't more offended by the pretentious policy of state-licensed marriage than by the particular manner in which it happens.

The state doesn't permit people to love each other or live together, so what's it doing permitting people to marry? Has the state become everybody's master? Why should we need its blessing?

In fact, many conservatives opposed to gay marriage would be perfectly fine with the state getting out of marriage licensing altogether, and many liberals supportive of gay marriage would be content to see the institution returned back to private life, where it belongs. The only people benefiting from the licensing of marriage are the politicians who use it as a political football in the "culture war," when most people might very well prefer a truce.

Separating marriage and state would also have the unique benefit of addressing the anti-gay marriage argument that if equality requires legalized gay marriage, it would likewise imply legalizing marriages among three or more individuals. Why not simply let people decide for themselves whether they're married, and let places of worship, businesses, and other private institutions and individuals agree or disagree as they see fit?

Re-privatizing marriage in California might seem unrealistic considering that all the other states have marriage licensing and that so many ancillary legal issues exist, such as wills and visitation rights. As to the harmonization among states, this will be a concern whenever any state varies in its marriage laws from the rest of the country — including in efforts to legalize gay marriage and in efforts to ban it outright in state constitutions. As for the peripheral legal questions, most of them could be settled by removing government from where it doesn't belong, and allowing the freedom of contract and freedom of association to prevail.

There really is no good reason to continue allowing the state to determine the terms for something as personal and sacred as marriage. One size does not fit all, and it is fundamentally unfair for the government to set the rules for marriage when, no matter how it sets them, it will understandably alienate large numbers of people. Get the government out of marriage, and the gay marriage issue can finally be laid to rest.