Op-Ed: Celebrate Our Diversity This Independence Day

The following op-ed was submitted to Winchester Patch by the Office of State Representative Michael S. Day.

This weekend we will celebrate the 4th of July, our country’s Independence Day. What began as an economic protest has turned into the most successful social experiment in history. While we sometimes take the principles of our democracy for granted, it is important to remember just how revolutionary our system of self-government truly is. When we declared certain truths to be self-evident, and then affirmed those truths by including a Bill of Rights in our Constitution, we became the first people to create a system dedicated to ensuring the protection of individual freedoms by limiting the powers of our own government.

Chief among those sacred and self-evident rights is the freedom of religion. In fact, the very first clause in the Bill of Rights reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” While tomes have been written about the importance of this clause’s impact on the separation of church and state, the protection of the free exercise of one’s religious beliefs is what truly distinguishes us from many other countries.

My ancestors were Roman Catholics from Ireland. They were persecuted for centuries for practicing their faith until they came to this country, where they found the freedom to openly attend Mass. I am a Roman Catholic, and have been since my parents baptized me shortly after I was born. I have never practiced another faith. Yet, through the gracious invitation of the leaders of the Islamic Center of Boston, last Thursday evening I participated in a very special Iftar, which is the customary gathering at sundown during which Muslims pray and break the day-long fast observed during the month of Ramadan.

The event was called the “Building Bridges Iftar,” and while there I learned about the different traditions found within the Muslim faith, was invited to join my hosts at prayer, and enjoyed a tremendous dinner. The highlight of the evening for me, though, was sitting alongside Muslims, Jews, Protestants, Mormons and atheists at small tables and simply talking. We spoke about the common misconceptions we held about each other’s faiths. We discussed the differences in our religious practices. Most importantly, we celebrated the fact that all of our religions were united by common beliefs in the power of love and the value of charity to others.

We spoke about the perversion of our respective faiths by extremists and zealots, most recently personified by those who committed murder at the Boston Marathon and at a church in Charleston, SC. As we talked, we condemned those fanatics and the damage they caused, and we rejected their hatred by sharing stories about our backgrounds. We built metaphorical bridges by simply listening to each other. It was a beautiful evening, and I left the Islamic Center with a renewed sense of community that cut across religion, race, gender and social status, and a renewed sense of excitement for Independence Day.

We live in the most diverse country in the world. We zealously protect our rights to individual expression, to choose our own identities and to express those identities peacefully. Ironically, we guarantee our individual freedoms by coming together to embrace and live under a common set of beliefs spelled out in our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution. It is that set of unifying beliefs that make our country so great. It is that set of beliefs that we first declared on July 4, 1776, and we rightly celebrate that declaration every year. Happy Independence Day.

(Photo courtesy of the Office of State Representative Michael S. Day)