If you’ve been on the internet or glanced at the news at some point after Friday, you’ll probably be shaking your head at “yet another post about SCOTUS passing the same-sex marriage law.” Or as Surgeon put it: “everyone and their mother is posting about that.”

But, dear Reader, I have so many things to say about it.

Let it be known, first off, that I was born into a conservative Hindu family. I grew up not knowing anything about being gay. Hell, I didn’t even know about sex until I was finally introduced though my IGCSE Biology class in tenth grade. Sex was as taboo a word as the worst curse you could think of. And sex between man and man or woman and woman? Let’s just say I thank my friends and literature classes for being brought up to speed there. Surprising as it was, it never really irked me. They exist, I told myself, and they don’t affect me.

Fast-forward to 2008, when Prop 8 (which eliminated the right for same-sex couples in California) was on the ballot. I remember the doorbell ringing and my father’s lovely voice floating into the den as he spoke with the two, clean-shaved, tie-adorned gentlemen handing him a flyer.

“Well of course I’ll vote yes,” he stated matter-of-factly, “we are Hindus, and we too think it’s a moral outrage.”

There were some sighs of relief and light laughter, the door closed, and the day went on. But something had been tripped in me. I sat there in the den for a long, long time. Should my being a Hindu really affect a random group of people who are NOT Hindu and want to live their lives their own way?

No. Of course not. Why should I dictate anything at all for anyone but myself? Let them be who they are. They have never asked me to be anything I am not.

When I brought this up with my father… well, I made it a point never to bring it up again. So, my fellow religious readers, I hear you. I understand the choice you’re grappling with, and I know the burden is heavy. But for me, it has become a simple choice when it comes to morality: do I harm anyone by making the choices I do? Voting yes on Prop 8 would have… it would have caused so much pain for good people who simply wanted to be together. Voting no? Sure, it may be uncomfortable for some to encounter gay couples, but no harm is being inflicted by either parties. Same-sex couples do not advocate their sexual orientation. They advocate awareness and acceptance, both of and by themselves and by society. What more can you expect from human beings who have been persecuted, segregated and mis-conceptualized for as long as history can remember?

Despite this moral realization, the issue still didn’t affect me. It was still them and me.

But then I met Surgeon.

Yes, Surgeon is a man, and I am a woman. But Surgeon is not Indian. He is not Hindu. In fact, when I first told my parents his last name, my mother’s face went a pale, sickly yellow.

“What do you MEAN!?” she whispered, “he’s from those who we cannot even… WE DON’T DO THIS!”

My father’s face wasn’t exactly any better. He demanded that I come to my senses, pick someone else, “ANYONE, but him,” and stop seeing Surgeon.

Now, understand this, Reader: Surgeon’s family is from Iran. Which means, inherently, his ancestors were Muslim. Which means that REGARDLESS of the fact that Surgeon does not practice Islam and is Agnostic, to my family, he’s Muslim.

Which means their eldest child is also about to carry a Muslim name.

And that simply cannot be done, Reader. If there is anything that is culturally banned, it would be a Hindu-Muslim marriage.

It was at this point in my yet-too-short-to-be-wise life that I finally understood what it meant to be a couple that loved and could not marry. Society has trained us to see this issue as “gay” marriage. No, Reader. No. This is a MARRIAGE issue. Always was and always will be. It would also serve us right to remember that a mere 52 years ago, in this very country we love and cherish, “states believe that the Negro (sic) is not the only threat to their racial purity, and therefore forbid whites to marry American Indians, West Indians, Asiatic Indians, Mongolians, Malays, Chinese, Japanese, Africans, “half-breeds,” and mestizos.”

52 years ago! Had I met Surgeon then… well, I’d been a criminal. A criminal for loving someone and desiring my all to be with them in the most honorable of ways.

And that, Reader, is a feeling I do not want to bestow on ANYONE. No one, NO ONE, deserves to feel this way about a thing so human as love.

As for those of you who, also like me, feel that government has really no business in dictating who marry’s who and hence refuse to celebrate accordingly (Facebook’s Rainbow Filter, for example) for SCOTUS’s few successes… please, stop it. For once in your life, put yourself and your opinions away. Bring out instead the compassion in you that drives you to be empathetic, that let’s you feel the joy in others, that revels in beauty and the sheer possibilities we have by being alive and go “rainbow.” Go “rainbow” for courage. Go “rainbow” for love. Go “rainbow” for gratitude.

Go rainbow because you, too, are human.