July 4 is the date we celebrate our Declaration of Independence, the document that set forth all the reasons that Britain’s colonies deserved to be free and independent of the country that ruled them. But it is not the long list of grievances that we remember, but that ringing preamble of Jefferson’s known to every schoolchild:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. …”
Those lines remain as radical today as when they were written in 1776. In her 2014 book, “Our Declaration,” Princeton professor Danielle Allen observes that the signers did not mean to suggest that we are all created equal in size, power, wealth, or even ability. Rather, she wrote, “our shared status is that of being creatures endowed with the same set of inalienable rights.” And as the Declaration goes on to say, it is the purpose of government to secure and protect those rights.
The 57 co-signers of the Declaration and the 13 states they represented fought a long war to achieve our independence. But the struggle to understand and realize the Declaration’s central premise did not end with Britain’s defeat. From a woman’s right to vote, to securing the civil rights of black Americans, to last week’s ruling by the Supreme Court upholding the right of any couple to marry regardless of sexual orientation, each generation has broadened our understanding of equality and those “Inalienable rights” with which we are all endowed.
“The Declaration of Independence matters because it helps us see that we cannot have freedom without equality,” Allen wrote. “It is out of egalitarian commitment that a people grows—a people that is capable of protecting us all collectively, and each of us individually, from domination. If the Declaration can stake a claim to freedom, it is only because it is so clear-eyed about the fact that the people’s strength resides in its equality.”
In his November 1863 Gettysburg Address, Lincoln hoped that with the end of slavery in the United States there could be “a new birth of freedom,” an idea as radical in its time as the struggle for gay rights has been in our own. But while last week’s Supreme Court decision is a milestone in the struggle for LGBT rights, the narrow 5–4 vote of the justices, continuing discrimination in the workplace, and intolerance for those with a different sexual orientation show that much work remains to be done. Achieving that equality of status envisioned by our founding fathers for ourselves and our neighbors remains a task for our generation and those that will follow. Harvard has long been home to same-sex couples and their children, with two churches that have declared themselves “open and affirming.” Let’s keep it that way.
