Abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention

Featured at Slate.com

The Department of Justice announced this month that it was investigating allegations that leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention mishandled sexual abuse accusations for decades. How have abusers exploited the church’s decentralized structure and notions of forgiveness to avoid accountability, and how have church teachings about sexuality and “purity culture” allowed the abuse to continue?

Guests:
Robert Downen, reporter at the Houston Chronicle.
Jules Woodson, co-founder and COO of Help;Hear;Heal, a nonprofit providing therapy funding for survivors of sexual abuse.

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Aug242022 TAGS: , ,

Oklahoma’s Upcoming Execution Spree

Featured at Slate.com

Despite its fraught history of botched executions, the state of Oklahoma is preparing to begin a 29 month execution spree this week. 25 dates have been set for men with severe mental illness, personal histories of childhood abuse, inadequate legal representation, or claims of innocence. Though these inmates have been deemed “the worst of the worst,” activist nun Sister Helen Prejean implores the world to look at fuller pictures of their lives, and seek out an alternative to the death penalty.

Guest: Sister Helen Prejean, anti-death penalty activist and author of Dead Man Walking, The Death of Innocents, and River of Fire.

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Aug242022 TAGS: , ,

The Migrants Texas Sent to New York City

Featured at Slate.com

As part of a stunt to protest the Biden administration’s immigration policies, the governors of Texas and Arizona have been sending bus-loads of migrants to DC and New York without any support. Immigrant advocate groups are scrambling to take care of these people, who were vulnerable well before being used as political props.

Guest: Murad Awawdeh, executive director at New York Immigration Coalition and NYIC Action

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Aug242022 TAGS: , , , , , , ,

The Red States Punishing Green Businesses

Featured at Slate.com

State treasurers in red states have been banding together to punish companies that are trying to divest themselves from the fossil fuel industry. But it isn’t clear if, say, BlackRock needs West Virginia more than West Virginia needs BlackRock. And this new front in the culture war may come with a bill that taxpayers have to pay.

Guest: David Gelles, correspondent on the Climate desk at The New York Times, covering the intersection of public policy and the private sector.

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Aug192022 TAGS: , ,

Will Kentucky Fail Breonna Taylor Again?

Featured at Slate.com

When Kentucky attorney general Daniel Cameron investigated the night Breonna Taylor was killed, his office concluded that the two officers who shot Taylor acted in good faith while executing the warrant provided. The Department of Justice’s investigation, however, suggests the warrant itself had false information, without which officers would never have been at Taylor’s home in the first place. Now a candidate for governor, will Cameron pay for his inattention in this high-profile case?

Guest: Tessa Duvall, Frankfort bureau chief for the Lexington Herald-Leader.

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Aug192022 TAGS: , , , ,

What the DOJ Should Do About Trump

Featured at Slate.com

After an FBI search of Mar-a-lago last week, it was revealed that Donald Trump is being investigated for federal crimes including violating the Espionage Act, obstruction of justice, and criminal handling of government records. How can the Justice Department do its job with the former president calling the investigation a hoax and his supporters demonstrating a willingness to respond violently? Who should be worried here?

Guest: Ankush Khardori, contributing writer for New York magazine’s Intelligencer and contributing editor at Politico Magazine.

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Aug192022 TAGS: , , ,

Local News Roundup: Auction at the Epicentre; CMS teacher vacancies; Airline cancellations; Optimist Hall paid parking

Featured at WFAE

After two postponed auctions, the Epicentre was finally sold at auction this week to the highest and only bidder, for a bid of $95 million. The buyer is the same bank that lent the money to the Epicentre’s former owner.

Get ready to open your wallet if you go to Optimist Hall after August 15. Parking fees will now be charged, to the tune of $18. Why the change?

With just a few weeks to go, there are still hundreds of teacher vacancies at Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. We’ll have an update.

And a transportation update including a new light rail stop, news from the Charlotte Regional Transportation Planning Organization and more.

Mike Collins and our roundtable of reporters delve into those stories and all the week’s top local and regional news on the Charlotte Talks local news roundup.

Guests:

Joe Bruno, WSOC-TV reporter

Mary C. Curtis, columnist for Rollcall.com, host of the Rollcall podcast “Equal Time”

Claire Donnelly, WFAE health reporter

Danielle Chemtob, investigative reporter with Axios Charlotte

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Aug122022

When it’s staring you in the face, it just might be the truth

Featured at Roll Call

“Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?”

The phrase has morphed from hackneyed joke to cliche to words to live by.

When I saw the street scene from the familiar city of Tucson, Ariz., it looked like a creation of Claes Oldenburg. But this tableau of a port-a-potty sliding into a plastic heap in the Southwestern heat was reality, not art object, something I doubt the artist, who recently died at 93 after a career of creativity, could ever have imagined.

When I lived in Tucson 30-plus years ago, we certainly had our hot days, ones where the sun seemed to be sitting on your shoulders with no relief in the weather report. But I don’t remember witnessing anything like that.

Yet, that image and so many more — wildfires all over the world, buckling airport runways and Texas roadways “bleeding” the binder that holds them together — have resulted in solutions that could only be described as temporary. Wrapping London’s Hammersmith Bridge in foil or coating Phoenix streets with a gray emulsion might work, but for how long?

And what’s to become of the iconic Tour de France? The first yellow jersey donned by the bicycle race leader in 1919 was made of wool, the thought of which is more than scary in 2022, when riders and spectators risked their lives while navigating twisty routes throughout that broiling country.

What are leaders doing about a long-term threat we feel in our cities, our homes and our bodies?

Hedging, dissembling and putting it off on our children and grandchildren, who must be thrilled at yet another problem left by the grown-ups.

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Aug032022 TAGS: ,

Examining post-Roe concerns over data privacy and health care inequities

Featured at Roll Call

The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade raised many questions on the future of abortion rights in the United States. With search histories and health apps possibly used for tracking, how can data be protected and kept private? Will the health care outcomes of African-American women, who are already three times more likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause than white women, worsen?

To shed some light on life in this post-Roe world, Equal Time host Mary C. Curtis talks with Amie Stepanovich, vice president for U.S. policy at the Future of Privacy Forum and a nationally recognized expert in domestic surveillance, cybersecurity and privacy law, as well as Kwajelyn Jackson, executive director of the Feminist Women’s Health Center, a nonprofit reproductive health, rights and justice organization based in Atlanta.

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Jul222022 TAGS: , , , ,

How do you make a 10-year-old disappear? It’s easier than it should be

Featured at Roll Call

I prayed for that 10-year-old child, raped and impregnated by a man who has confessed to the monstrous crime, a young girl who then had to travel from her home state to end that pregnancy.

Then, I prayed for America.

Just when you think things can’t get worse, that human nature couldn’t sink any lower, something happens to prove you wrong, to make you realize that the country is truly broken in ways that each day make the path to healing more difficult to imagine.

It is the case of the girl child who was quickly transformed from flesh and blood human being, used and abused by adults tasked to take care of her, to political cudgel, used and abused by a country that says it cares about its children most of all — and obviously doesn’t mean it.

If you cheered the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, the constitutional protection for those seeking and providing abortions, this is the ultimate nightmare. It’s not the vision of a post-Roe world you want to present to the world, this story of a 10-year-old abandoned by the courts and the country’s health care system, a child many would have forced to bear a child conceived in violence, no matter the physical and emotional costs.

So, does that mean the most extreme foes of abortion rights have started to rethink the wisdom of their plans to enact ever harsher and stricter abortion bans in the states?

Of course not.

Instead, the narrative quickly shifted from stories of the indecisive giving birth and feeling vindicated by the choice forced upon them — to be sure, an occurrence that does happen — to a harsher alternative: Erase a 10-year-old, or worse, turn her into a weapon dreamed up by abortion rights activists and the party whose members overwhelmingly support that right.

For those with blinders on, softening an anti-abortion stance might require compromise, which equals hypocrisy if you sincerely believe life begins at conception — no exceptions allowed. But that kind of compromise simply makes room for the complexity that is real life.

Read the rest atRoll Call
Jul222022 TAGS: ,
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