Next time you’re with someone you love, look in their eyes and tell them so.

Then imagine being told you are wrong for caring about that person, that your love is perverse and unacceptable to anyone with a sense of common decency.

Them’s fightin’ words, folks.

I’ve earned my reputation as a patient man by watching how others lost their tempers over the little things and learning to let those go.

But don’t tell my friends and relatives that they’re wrong to love each other, to fight for their rights to support each other in marriage; without expecting to find me there hackles raised and ready to take a chunk out of you – whether you’re a small-minded anti-LGBT rights protestor or an honorable justice sitting on the bench of the U.S. Supreme Court.

In my eyes, SCOTUS has a rather narrow margin of acceptable rulings it can make in judging the constitutionality of California’s Proposition 8 and the federal Defense of Marriage Act.

It needs to strike them down.

My cousin, Ryan Fong, married his husband, Eric Dye, during the brief window when same-sex marriages were legal in California. Ryan earned his Ph.D. in English and found a job as a professor in Michigan, a state that amended its constitution to prohibit not only same-sex marriage but also any other form of civil union or domestic partnership between same-sex couples.

“I had to think: do I take a job that I’ve been working for almost 10 years to get, even if it means giving up some of my civil rights? This is just part of the reality of living life as an LGBT person under DOMA,” Ryan said.

Along their drive from California to Michigan, Ryan and Eric made light of their fluctuating marital status. California? Married. Nevada? Not married. Iowa? Hey, married again!

Some ugly truths made laughing harder upon their arrival in Michigan. Eric recalled when at an orientation at his new job working for the county, a woman tried to explain how the sick leave policy worked.

“She said that, for example, if my wife got sick, I could use sick leave to take care of her,” Eric said. “I knew what the answer would be, but then I asked, ‘What about my husband?’” The woman had to go and check, eventually telling Eric that he could not use sick leave to take care of Ryan.

In 24 states, including Michigan, same-sex couples have no hospital visitation rights as relatives. The only option available for them to take care of one another in a crisis is via power of attorney.

That person you love. Imagine having to go through extra loopholes of paperwork to be able to stay near them after they’ve been in an accident; or being ousted from waiting by their bedside because visiting hours are over and you aren’t related to your loved one, by legal definition.

What if the person you’re thinking of is still a child? When you look that girl or girl in the eyes and say you love her, do you imagine her growing up and marrying a man? Would you be surprised if she married a woman instead?

“I think we would go a long way to starting to change the culture for the better if people did not all assume heterosexuality,” Eric said. “We still live in a culture that assumes people are straight and that you are somehow abnormal if you’re gay. Even just beginning with the types of language we use, we can begin to change this culture.”

Where to begin with changing the language?

Tell your friends, your family, that you love them – without judging them, without any conditions or prerequisites.

And if you can’t look them in the eye while saying it, maybe they aren’t the ones with the problem.