ALL PEOPLE’S BREAKFAST honoring Martin Luther King

This morning I recommitted myself to broadening discussions about politics and religion in American life and to participating in uncomfortable conversations about those topics whenever it is appropriate to do so.

José Antonio Vargas, the keynote speaker at a breakfast attended by more than a thousand people, spoke eloquently about the plight of millions of people living productively but in fear in the United States because they were brought to the country as children and not told until they were grown-up that they lacked the necessary “papers” that would allow them to stay and become the citizens they had always thought they were. Vargas was a sixteen-year-old high student in Mountain View, California, when he learned the truth of his “illegal” immigration status. Born in the Philippines, he was provide by relatives with fraudulent identity documents which helped him avoid deportation and remain in the U.S.

Mr. Vargas had become a distinguished, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist (2008) when he said he could no longer continue to live with a lie about who he is. He had to take charge of his own life by dealing with the distortion of truth about his immigration status. His first step was to be honest about it. The essay he wrote confessing his immigration status was published in the New York Times Sunday Magazine in 2011. The week it was published his essay was the “most-mailed” piece of writing for The Times.

Mr. Vargas founded Define American, a project aimed at keeping conversation going about the DREAM Act , which would provide for people in his situation a path to citizenship through education or service in the military.

Vargas said his decision to come out as gay in high school in 1999 was “less daunting” than coming out as a person without appropriate identity documents. What resonated with me especially was his statement that “If we, as residents and citizens, are not engaged in uncomfortable conversations,” we are not doing what needs to be done to correct situations which hurt people who are hurting through no fault of their own.