Dear America,

You can refuse to vote for an anti-gay marriage amendment; you can vote based on a belief that marriage doesn't need any protection, it simply needs people to fall in love and participate in it. You can vote against instantiating exclusionary practices and bigoted beliefs in your state constitutions. You can stand up and say "My gay daughter" or "My gay son" deserves the same rights and privileges my other children enjoy.

You can do all these wonderful things and more--you can work to show your neighbors and colleagues, your friends that policies based on fear and animosity, policies that serve to divide and exclude, policies that allow people to stare down their noses at other people are not policies worth our country. You can do all these things and I will applaud. I will thank each and every one of you for your support, for your belief that my life is no less valuable than any other person's life.

But, I will also be sad. I will be sad because the ballot might as well have said, "Is Amy good enough to join our country club?" And you get to vote about it. You get to vote about whether I am good enough to be counted, good enough to enjoy the promise of America.

Perhaps I shouldn't be sad. America has, in some ways, always functioned like an exclusive club with certain people free to come and go as they please and others relegated to entering/exiting through the back door: members enjoying, exploiting, benefitting from the labors of the non-members. America though is not and never has been simply a country club. Despite the separate entrances, despite the inequalities, despite the injustice of it all, always at the core stood these words:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

These are the promises: Justice, Tranquility, Common Defence, General Welfare, Liberty. America has never been perfect at keeping those promises, far from perfect, but some of We the People never shied from working towards fulfilling those promises. Since the beginning, We the People fought, marched, boycotted, litigated, sat-in, voted. We the People pushed back the us/them divide, pulled ever-larger the citizen circle.

We the People refused to simply be a country club. We decided that slavery was wrong, we decided that women should get to vote, we decided that segregation was unequal, we decided the We the People included/should include All the People. (Paradoxically enough, it seems, self-evident truths are apparently not color- and gender-blind.) We the People decided that differences, unknowns mattered less than the promises to "ourselves and our posterity." We stood and proclaimed "We the Citizens of this United States welcome you."

Sadly, though, we've begun to retreat. We've returned to the country club model, begun to erect a fence around our freedoms, an exclusive list left at the gate with armed guards. We've taken to sending more and more (instead of less and less) people around back. They get paid; oddly enough they even pay their dues (taxes), but they need not make reservations for dinner; they're not allowed.

We act as if Justice is a non-renewable resource, that if we treat everyone Justly, none will be left for lunch tomorrow. That the General Welfare need not include the general populace. That the Common Defence is color-coded. That Tranquility wears a price tag. That Liberty should be quarantined lest someone take it.

Dear America, Dear America, when Freedom isn't free, it dies. When America isn't free, when we retreat from our promises and Our Promise because we fear and because we hate, when we turn our backs on our progress, when we refuse to go farther, when we shrink the citizen circle smaller and smaller, America dies. The oxygen, the food, the life-sustaining elements of America are its promises: Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

Dear America, let us be a Country again. Let us break bread together. Let us become that more perfect union. Let us decide that we will not bow to our base instincts. Let us no longer fear sharing America's promise.