This past Wednesday, after the farmer’s market, I walked home with the one leftover loaf of apricot almond sourdough from Camina Bakery—easily the best bakery in Northern California (go ahead and put that on something!). Since we had already sold out of everything else, I figured I’d take the final loaf home and offer it to my new neighbor a few doors down. I hadn’t met him yet, and sharing bread seemed like a good way to break the ice.

We chatted briefly. He was polite, thankful, seemed friendly enough. We exchanged a few pleasantries, and as I turned to head back home, I noticed a bumper sticker on the back of his Ford F-150:

“America: Love it or Leave it.”

And just like that, the gift of bread soured a little.

Because here I am, a queer farmer who co-runs a non-profit garden project, manages a for-profit farm, works for the best bakery in NorCal, and publishes books I’m sure my neighbor would be eager to burn, handing out free bread just because, and I’m the one this bumper sticker is presumably warning against. The progressive queer who must obviously hate America. (Said with a dripping sarcasm so thick it might need a serrated knife.)

But let’s set the sarcasm aside for a moment and actually talk about this slogan.

“America: Love it or leave it” is a phrase rooted not in patriotism, but in insecurity. At its core, it’s a demand for silence disguised as a call to loyalty. And ironically, it’s about as un-American as it gets.

The First Amendment—the cornerstone of this whole American experiment—protects speech, even the kind that critiques, condemns, or outright hates the government. In fact, the Supreme Court, back when it still had a shred of credibility, ruled in Texas v. Johnson (1989) that flag burning is protected speech. You can literally set fire to the symbol of the nation, and the Constitution says: “Yep, still protected.” That’s not a loophole in the Constitution, its the the whole point of it.

To love America is, paradoxically, to allow people to not love it. That’s the uncomfortable beauty of a pluralistic democracy: people are free to worship differently, think differently, vote differently, speak differently, and yes, even criticize the state harshly. If your vision of patriotism can’t survive someone else’s dissent, it was never patriotism to begin with. Instead, it was blatant propaganda.

What’s more, if we take the Hebrew prophets seriously (and I do), love of one’s nation demands critique. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos… these weren’t guys flying flags off the back of their lifted pickup trucks and telling everyone to shut up and obey. They were raging against injustice, economic exploitation, corrupt leadership, and religious hypocrisy. To love your country, in their eyes, was to hold it accountable to its highest ideals.

And guess what? That’s what people like me are doing.

We plant gardens where there used to be ash and rubble.
We bake bread and give it away.
We create spaces of belonging for the marginalized and the forgotten.
We speak out against cruelty and call for justice, equity, and inclusion, not because we hate this country, but because we love what it could be.

And if you think love means never criticizing your country, I’d invite you to try that approach in your closest relationships. Imagine telling your spouse, “If you don’t like the way I treat you, leave.” That’s not love, that’s manipulation. That’s fucking control. That’s emotional abuse dressed up as devotion, and it couldn’t be further from love.

The truth is, unless this turns into a literal episode of The Handmaid’s Tale, I’m not going anywhere. I live here. I farm here. I write here. I raise my kid here. And I’m going to keep speaking up, planting seeds, selling bread, and pushing this country to live up to its stated values, whether that’s popular or not.

So to my neighbor with the F-150 and the bumper sticker:

Thanks for the chat.
I hope you enjoy the bread.
And I hope you come to see that loving America doesn’t mean silencing dissent. It means welcoming it, even when it makes you uncomfortable.

Because that’s the deal we signed up for. And I, for one, intend to hold us to it.

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