Professor Boyer Jarvis provided the inspiration for this issue with his December 13th address on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, also linked through our web site. Born out of the horrors of the last world war, the Declaration remains a vision of hope for humans everywhere.

It took far too many years for the Utah Legislature to finally recognize the birth day of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Utah was one of the last states to do so, and first only as "Human Rights Day" (see the chronology elsewhere on this page). Today, however, Ogden has an African-American mayor, George Garwood, Jr., the first black mayor in the state of Utah.

But all is not well. Recent dragnets at the Salt Lake Airport were criticized for alleged racist tactics. Planned Parenthood of Utah still has to contend with threats, although they have not had to deal with an anthrax threat since 1998.

Utahns of the Democratic persuasion will remember 2001 as the year that legislators cut up the map of Utah and stitched it back together into an electoral Frankenstein, hideously deformed and lacking the breath and vigor of life. "Love it or leave it" letters to the editor provided a drumbeat of intolerance in our local daily newspapers.

And then there is the War on Terrorism, a demonstration of Surrealism as the operative philosophy for conducting foreign policy and trimming civil liberties.

Human rights? Have you used yours lately? Do you really have some? How do you know?

--Richard Garrard