Editorial: 'We hold these truths. . . '

Suffering through a sweltering Philadelphia summer 235 years ago, the Founding Fathers engaged in a debate as hot as the streets. In the first week of July, they managed to agree on a letter explaining to King George III why the United States of America had to break off from Great Britain, and justifying that revolutionary action to the world.

As a declaration of war it was tardy, since the colonies had already been fighting the mother country behind the army of Gen. George Washington for a year. As a manifesto, it was magnificent in ways the Founders probably never even imagined, because it was pregnant with freedoms yet to come. The Declaration defined not only who we were, but the better people we were destined to be.

The document is most revered for its second sentence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

It was a marvelous idea to promote, and a visionary guideline for creating a nation. But it was also, in execution and understanding, grossly limited. The first draft included a section on the horrors of slavery that didn't make the final version, but the point of it was to chastise Great Britain for imposing the practice on the colonies, not to suggest black people were equal or had been imbued by the Creator with anything like the rights white men had.

What the founders meant, really, was that white, heterosexual men, particularly if they were Christian, of British lineage and owned property, should be able to enjoy liberty and pursue happiness. They didn't disenfranchise women or blacks or homosexuals on purpose: It simply never occurred to the authors that these people might deserve equal rights.

The idea that the Declaration might justify freedom for black people first achieved real prominence three years before the Civil War began, when Abraham Lincoln, in a debate with Stephen Douglas, said, "I had thought the Declaration contemplated the progressive improvement in the condition of all men everywhere." Many historians argue Lincoln was wrong and the authors hadn't intended that at all, but the trend of making the freedoms the Declaration supported more and more inclusive had begun. It was used to argue for women's equal rights at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, when the women who had gathered there rewrote it, as a "Declaration of Sentiments," to read "all men and women are created equal."

Today, the broadening understanding that these freedoms are everyone's due -- no matter gender, sexuality, religion, ability, age or other circumstance -- continues to gain acceptance. The passage of same-sex marriage in New York State illustrates our most recent improvement in interpreting this founding document.

The fight to secure the rights enumerated in our Declaration is often waged in other nations. In Egypt, Yemen, Libya and Bahrain, where the battle for political freedom rages, it is at the root of people's desires. In Saudi Arabia, where women seek rights as simple as driving, its influence is felt. All over the world, where people seek freedom, the Declaration of Independence had a hand in teaching them what freedom is.

And after 235 years, it is aging wonderfully well. hN