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Update:
- Attorney Heidi Boghosian and Professor Johanna Fernandez Discuss Potential New Trial For Mumia Abu-Jamal
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Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment
In her engaging new book Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz chronicles the history of American gun culture and its casualties. From Andrew Jackson, the slave trade, the extermination of indigenous populations, domestic terrorist organizations such as the KKK to serial killings, U.S. history is rife with violence. What is the underpinning for such violence?
Dunbar-Ortiz argues that it is the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution and the resulting gun culture that it spawned. She lays out an array of historical facts and figures that will be new information for many readers. In doing so she provokes questions about the American ethos to help inform pressing issues confronting the nation, from mass shootings in schools to police killings with impunity.
In her meticulously researched book, Dunbar-Ortiz investigates the dynamics of armed struggle within the U.S., their motivations and their contemporary relevance.
Publishers Weekly writes: “In her trenchant analysis of the Second Amendment, Dunbar-Ortiz avoids a legalistic approach and eschews the traditional view that links the amendment to citizens” need to protect themselves from a tyrannical government. Instead, she argues that the Second Amendment was passed to facilitate the genocide of Native Americans in order to steal their land and to provide a means for slaveholders to control their human property.”
Guest – Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, historian, author, memoirist, and speaker who researches Western Hemisphere history and international human rights. Her 1977 book The Great Sioux Nation was the fundamental document at the First United Nations Conference on Indians in the Americas, held at the United Nations’ headquarters in Geneva. Her other books include Outlaw Woman, and the acclaimed An Indigenous People’s History of the United States. Her newest book Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment, is published by City Lights.
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Bearing Faith: The Limits of Catholic Health Care for Women of Color
Catholic affiliated hospitals set strict guidelines that prohibit doctors from providing contraceptives, sterilization, abortion, and fertility services regardless of their patients wishes or their doctors’ medical judgment or the standard of care in the medical profession.
A just released report titled Bearing Faith: The Limits of Catholic Health Care for Women of Color by the Columbia Law School’s Public Rights/Private Conscience Project in partnership with Public Health Solutions shows that in many states women of color are far more likely than white women to give birth at Catholic hospitals. These women are at greater risk of having their health needs undermined because these health needs have been determined by the religious beliefs of male bishops rather than the medical judgment of their doctors.
This religious overreach undermines fundamental rights to equality and liberty and violates the establishment clause of the First Amendment which seeks to separate church from state.
Guest – Attorney Elizabeth Reiner Platt. Director of the Public Rights/Private Conscience Project at the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia Law School. Before joining Columbia, she was a Staff Attorney at MFY Legal Services Mental Health Law Project.
Guest – Kira Shepherd, Director of the Racial Justice Program at the Public Rights/Private Conscience Project at the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia Law School. Before joining Columbia Law School she was the Executive Director and Director of Campaigns at The Black Institute (TBI), an action think tank that leads advocacy work in the areas of immigration, education, the environment, and economic justice.
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