This article is by Evan Wolfson, founder and president of Freedom to Marry, the campaign that won marriage equality in the United States. He is widely considered the architect of the movement that led to nationwide victory.

I wish I could begin this exhortation to voters by saying how important and how exhilarating it will be to elect the first woman president of the United States… because having a woman in the White House is important and will be exhilarating, a massive empowerment that will ripple through lives and around the world.

I wish I could dive into the myriad policy and law reasons why voting for Hillary Clinton is vital for voters concerned with the Supreme Court and America's ideals; foreign policy, world stability, and peace, growing the economy and reversing the erosion of the middle-class; investing in our degraded national infrastructure and civic space; fixing our broken immigration and education systems; restoring voting rights and combating the epidemics of guns, money in politics, and environmental abuse; and the many serious matters at stake in a presidential race where the other candidate has virtually nothing to say about almost any of these crucial concerns (and what he has to say is worse than nothing).

I wish I could appropriately note that the enormous progress we have made in advancing the freedom, equality, dignity and inclusion of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people will undoubtedly be furthered by a vote for Clinton and indisputably jeopardized by a vote for her opponent.

I am enormously proud of the transformation and triumph we delivered in winning the freedom to marry here in the United States, and am intent on seeing our movement continue to harness the power of the marriage conversation and our victory to the remaining political, legal, and cultural work still before us.

I even wish I could highlight as an additional reason for voting the Democratic ticket my personal ability to vouch firsthand for the qualifications and just basic goodness of Hillary's Vice Presidential candidate, my law school friend, Tim Kaine.

Tim is as great a candidate for America's future (and for LGBT people, women, working people, and just about every cause I care about) as the Republican VP candidate, Mike Pence, is awful.

I wish I could tie the case for voting Democratic this year to an appreciation of the accomplishments and dignity of the Obama presidency and the legacy a vote for Clinton would help cement. I miss President Obama already.

In short, I wish I could make the case for voting for the Democratic presidential ticket (and for electing a Democratic House and Senate) on its own merits, as one's choices as a voter ideally would be made.

But this election is like none other in our lifetime, perhaps none other in the history of our Republic.

No one likes to be told there is no choice… and there are many reasons to cast an affirmative vote for Clinton-Kaine and a functional Congress. But in this election, ultimately, there really is no choice: America must reject the first-ever completely unfit candidate put forward by a major party. America must not elect a repugnant, embarrassing, and unworthy authoritarian con man. Americans must not risk democracy itself to voice frustration about imperfections in our union or the binary before us as we take the next step into the future. And so more than all the above – weighty as all the arguments for Hillary Clinton would be – it is fire-alarm-in-the-night imperative to elect her president in order to resoundingly repudiate a repellent and deadly dangerous menace to our country and the world.

The Trump threat is existential, and we must vote to make clarion clear that Trump and the party that enabled him are not who Americans are and that installing this disgusting candidate in the White House is not a cliff we will leap from or push our children and future off of.

As 32 years working to win the freedom to marry in the US shows, I am an optimist.

I believe our country will get this right. But they were 32 years of work, and I also believe that getting it right takes work. We have – mercifully – just days now in which we must tune out the noise and focus on our moment of destiny now.

We have just days in which we can stop hand-wringing over our anxiety or binge-watching pundits, and, instead, actually take action to avert disaster.

On November 8, I am going to vote Clinton/Kaine. Between now and then, I am going to do everything I can to make sure that every possible Clinton/Kaine voter votes, and talks to others. And I am going to raise my voice to encourage waverers and purists to focus on the stakes and the moment and pull America back from the brink. This time, there is no choice… but there is a good choice. And that choice is clear and it is here:

Show the world, and our kids, who we Americans are and what we are not. Say No to Trump. Vote Clinton for President.

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November 3, 2016