Put away “T’was the Night Before Christmas”, I want to re-read the Declaration of Independence.

This time of year hardly seems ripe for a look at this founding document.

We tend to review holiday shopping lists and New Year’s resolutions this time of year – not that most of us actually review the Declaration around the Fourth of July. But in this post-election season of “moral values” debate and political backlash, I’d rather illuminate my “pursuit of happiness” than some Christmas tree anyway.

When Thomas Jefferson penned those words, we not only launched the US of A, but also declared that “unalienable Rights” are, well, “self-evident”, thank you very much. I sort of have to believe that even though all of these rights weren’t explicitly spelled out at the time, Mr. Jefferson would find any law prohibiting his affair with Sally Hemmings, a black slave, to be none of the government’s business.

Of course, it only took us another 87 years to emancipate the northern slaves, 101 years on top of that to guarantee rights to blacks, and three years after that before the Supreme Court said a state couldn’t prohibit people of different races from marrying each other.

A lot of people in the GLBT community find that the marriage issue has been too divisive – that we’ve gone too far in advancing the progressive agenda of a minority. Asking for marital equality before you have employment rights is crazy, they claim. To suppose that the HRC or any part of GLBT political leadership could have reined in gay litigants, civil authorities in San Francisco, Oregon or upstate New York, or the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court – so they could all follow one, united strategy – is crazy.

The good news is that most people (53 percent) believe that our unalienable rights should include at least civil union rights for gay and lesbian couples, according to a CBS News/New York Times poll last month. And still, next year our community will again have to fight an effort to ban that pursuit of happiness issue in the Constitution.

In the fictitious movie Runaway Jury, jury consultant/bad guy Gene Hackman is hired to protect the interests of a gun company that is being sued for negligence in a major case in Louisiana. He instructs his investigative team to find the “one secret” that each juror has, so that it can be used to intimidate them to find for the gun company, or risk exposure. One juror had an abortion, one drinks, one is HIV positive, and all are gotten to by Hackman’s henchmen.

My only point with this example is that only after we remove being gay or being partnered from being our “one secret” will we begin to move that 53 percent up to a level of civic acceptance. I’m not encouraging personal endangerment – to personal safety or security – but am suggesting that coming out everywhere is the grassroots campaign we need more than checks to gay advocacy groups. So the next form you fill out that asks “Single, Married, Divorced” – cross out married and put “Gay, unable to marry”. Or the next time you’re having your furnace serviced, let the dispatcher know your “partner” will meet them at your residence. If you stop and think about it, most of us selectively restrict information about ourselves that straight people take for granted.

Columnist note: After nine and a half years and 222 iterations, I have decided to give my self-syndicated column a rest. There are other pursuits – both personal and literary – that deserve my time right now. I greatly appreciate the editors, publishers and mostly my readers for giving me the chance to espouse my views since July 13, 1995, with that first column in the Gay & Lesbian Times. And a special word of thanks to my friends who lent a critical eye to my columns and themes. Thank you all.