I have seen a lot of debate about same-sex marriage, but very rarely have I seen it debated on the terms in which I have always seen the issue. A prohibition on gay marriage seems like a fairly straightforward case of coercive government regulation.

So, the avenues available to us for justifying or repudiating it should be very similar to those available for more mundane sorts of rules. Frankly, it is surprising how many people with libertarian leanings are opposed to legalizing same-sex marriage.

It would only be a slight oversimplification to consider marriage a transaction, and libertarians tend to presume that government has no business interfering with voluntary transactions between informed individuals, as they will always be mutually beneficial, and so contribute positively to social welfare. Seen in this light, legalizing same-sex marriage would be de-regulation – a “privatizing” that could set a strong precedent for government butting-out in other arenas.Still, people who traditionally advocate for a free society have an undeniable tendency to end up on the other side of this particular issue.

Why? Well, ask, and one gets a wide array of responses with varying legitimacy. We can immediately dismiss any talk of “what marriage is” as niggling semantics at best and misleading rhetoric at worst. We should also avoid the temptation to be swayed by religious feelings

It would be unwise and I daresay un-American to let religious doctrine, however commonly believed, outweigh public welfare in a policy decision. After this culling, we are left with an argument that has appeared (among other places) in the Review.

This argument is simple: that there is an overarching public interest in recognizing only heterosexual families. People have backed this up with too many claims to enumerate here, but there are a few top picks. Perhaps gay marriage would rob the traditional family of some of its remaining social currency, speeding the decline of Western civilization. Some worry about negative population growth and do not want to allow society to lose its focus on reproduction.

South Park warned us that a more accepted gay culture could turn men into wusses, leaving us open to invasion by malevolent crab-people.I’m not going to take a side on whether this public interest exists. It is not that I don’t want to, but trying to argue my opinion would be a big distraction from the point I am much more interested in making.

It should be clear that an intelligent debate about prohibiting gay marriage should focus on one thing: whether it yields a social benefit that outweighs all the individual lost utilities from people affected by the law.

If we kept this focus, we could not help but reach a sensible conclusion and would be in a fine position to start tackling our government’s lower-profile, higher-impact regulations in the near future.