Thanks; everyone for the responses to my article. I will try to address everyone in the next day or two. Lets start with spowell_2 because your solution is basically the same as mine was. My solution was:

isnull(Column, ' ') like @Parameter.

Unfortunately you take a little hit with cpu time to do the isnull function on each column but its a very clean solution.

tbredehoft - what do you do with the parameters where the user does not enter any search critera? You end up with a situation like where (firstName is null or firstname='')