As I sit down before my computer, pull up the Microsoft Office application and stare at the blank white screen that’s been staring right back for a good 10 to 15 minutes, I realize something:

I’m not sure how to write this column.

As opinion editor of this paper, I am constantly asking my columnists to “find a new angle.”

“Think of a story that hasn’t been told.”

“Don’t sell me the same old, same old.”

But here I am, desperate to write a column about how upset — no, how furious, how sorrowful, how shocked and terrified I am — about civil rights, and what it means to be equal in this country.

With a narrow 53 percent to 47 percent ratio, voters in Maine have decided that equality isn’t important. Even if that isn’t what goes through its mind, it is a message it sends loud and clear.

In a statement to a cheering crowd of supporters, Frank Schubert, campaign manager of the opposition to marriage equality, beamed, “The institute of marriage has been preserved.”

At the same time, partners Lisa Brackbill and Lisa Pugh, residents of Buckfield, Maine, wept.

I cannot express how distasteful this is, to see one group cheering as they vote down the rights of another group. As tyranny takes foothold in our democratic process in a way not seen since World War II, when Japanese-Americans who had done nothing wrong had their rights stripped away without question, without explanation and without remorse.

If you believe this country is founded on rights, Maine has shown that you, that I, that we — are wrong.

If a controlling majority may treat a historically underrepresented and historically mistreated minority as second-class citizens by voting away rights, then we do not have rights at all. In this scenario they are instead, at best, privileges. Temporary ones that may, at any time when you become the minority, be stripped away from you.

But I can’t make you see this. I can only, just barely, relate to you my life.

I can, for example, relate to you a night out on the town with friends, where you notice the cute boy or girl looking your way ­— yes, right at you, sending a gentle blush and smile your way with a wave — and how much that means, how good that makes you feel.

But what I can’t relate to you is how much the words from onlookers sink into your heart when they tell you how they jokingly placed bets: How long until he finds out that she is transgender, what his reaction will be, how it should be videotaped.

I can’t explain how degrading it is to us as individuals to be crushed under the boot of the privileged. To not be given a second thought.

The institution of marriage hasn’t been preserved in Maine. It has been, without a second thought, elevated and held over the heads of those who most desire it, thanks to a privileged — and tyrannous — majority.

If we are a country that believes in rights — by which I mean true rights, no poetics, no religion, no partisan bickering attached — then we cannot abide by this. Marriage is a right. Loving v. Virginia, the landmark case that broke the color barrier for marriage, established that, and the Supreme Court has consistently followed that example. Civil, secular, lawful marriage has no place being placed beyond the reach of non-related, consenting adults.

Religious marriage may be a sacrament to some, and it may very well deserve that title. But only within that religion. Not in the eyes of the law.

Not in the eyes of rights.

This battle will come to our state. Inevitably, it will come.

I only hope by that time we choose to believe and act upon our belief in rights rather than claim to know what rights are and, doing as Maine has done, strip them away from our fellow Americans.

Sophie Prell is a senior in pre-journalism and mass communication from Alta

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