From the Air America Radio home page (remember you can listen online if you don't have satellite radio or live in one of the 64 areas that Air America Radio is broadcast over the airwaves):
The Laura Flanders Show
Saturdays and Sunday 7pm-10pm
Saturday: Laura's frontline Downing Street Memo coverage continues with Amb. Joe Wilson, who testified at the House Judiciary Committee Democrat's hearing and Rep. Maxine Waters(D-CA), who announced a new Out of Iraq Congressional Caucus, with 41 members. Also Ohio election lawyer and investigative reporter Bob Fitrakis delivers updates on the Judiciary Dems other top issue: election reform. And Laura revisits Alternet's "Start Making Sense," their post-election activism book, with co-editor Lakshmi Chaudhry and Adam Werbach, of the Common Assets.
Sunday: Eve Ensler has a plan to shut down the prison at Guantanamo Bay. Then MacArthur Justice Center Attorney Joseph Margulies, will expand on his testimony before the on Gitmo's abuses. Then, a quick return visit with Shelby Knox, who is profiled in a PBS documentary about sex-education in Texas, called "The Education of Shelby Knox". And finally, Staceyann Chin on her new one-woman show, "Border/Clash - A Litany of Desires."
On the second to last guest listed for Sunday night, Shelby Knox, as a reminder we'll pull from a Thursday post:
Billie also notes Star Silva's "Who's Afraid of Shelby Knox: Sex, Textbooks, and the Culture Wars-Lessons from Lubbock." Members who listen to The Laura Flanders Show, weekends on Air America radio, are familiar with Shelby Knox. From Silva's interview with Knox:
T[exas]O[bserver]: The film conveys a steadily-increasing awareness of the problems in the world around you. How is it that you developed such a keen social consciousness to note these problems and find solutions? Was it your upbringing that gave you a different perspective, as opposed to those of other apathetic or politically ignorant youth?
Shelby Knox: I don't think it makes me different. Basically I started seeing girls disappear. They would get pregnant and be forced to go to a special school for pregnant high-school girls. I saw the stigma of [people who pointed out], "She's a slut, but he got her pregnant, so he's a player."And how unfair it was! When you trace it back to the root it was that we weren’t getting more sex education. One girl told me that she didn’t think she would get pregnant because her boyfriend smoked enough pot that he had killed all of his semen, which he told her just to get in her pants. These girls weren't being educated, and it wasn't fair. Maybe you could say it started as a feminist issue or just an awareness, but I started realizing that the lack of sex education was hurting people my own age. Many of them weren't getting the education at home or they weren't going [elsewhere] to get that information. It was the responsibility of the school to provide it.
TO: You testified in favor of comprehensive sex ed at a textbook hearing. What do you think of the Texas Board of Educators’ approval of textbooks and the studies they rely on?
SK: Yeah, I testified, which was really scary. My guy from Lubbock was sleeping. I swear, he was against the wall sleeping. I was the last person to testify, and there was no response at all. The opposition had bused in all these 14- and 15-year-old girls to make impassioned speeches about the school making them want to have sex and about how they wanted to save themselves. And every single one would end their speech with, "I'm so-and-so, I'm 15, and I'm worth the wait." They had scripts! And they would get responses from and talk to everyone on the board.I gave my speech, and they just looked at me. I think I was, from what I saw, the only young person they didn't respond to. And what's really scary is that textbook publishers don't want to redo books for every state, so the books that are approved in Texas [will be distributed] across the nation. Texas is one of the largest textbook distributors; our books are distributed across the nation. And we have the most conservative books, so we are actually harming the other states.
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