Lamar talks about the revelations in his chilling investigative report for The Rag Blog, entitled ‘Child murder in Texas.’
Lamar Hankins on Rag Radio in the studios of KOOP-FM in Austin, Texas, September 12, 2014. Photo by Roger Baker / The Rag Blog.
Lamar W. Hankins, a columnist for The Rag Blog and a former San Marcos city attorney, joins us on Rag Radio to discuss his investigative reporting about a major scandal involving an East Texas fundamentalist church.
Lamar’s Rag Blog article, “Child murder in Texas,” about the very cultish Church of Wells, went viral, attracting tens of thousands of readers, well over a thousand Facebook shares, and more than 250 impassioned comments.
The story involves the death of three-day-old Faith Pursley who died of a routinely treatable condition because the church “elders” convinced Faith’s parents to leave the child’s fate to “God’s will” rather than seeking medical treatment, and then urged church members to pray for her “resurrection.” No action has been taken by the Cherokee County district attorney’s office.
On the show, Lamar also discusses Rick Perry’s legal problems about which he has reported at The Rag Blog
Download the podcast of our September 12, 2014 Rag Radio interview with Lamar W. Hankins here — or listen to it here:
Rag Radio is a weekly hour-long syndicated radio program produced and hosted by Rag Blog editor Thorne Dreyer. The show is produced in the studios of KOOP 91.7-FM, a cooperatively-run all-volunteer community radio station in Austin, Texas, and is first broadcast live on KOOP every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CDT).
Lamar Hankins, a writer and semi-retired attorney in San Marcos, Texas, is a veteran of the civil rights and the anti-Vietnam War movement, worked with VISTA, and later managed a legal services agency. As an attorney, he helped sue the Texas prison system for providing lesser training and educational opportunities to women inmates, and was co-counsel in a class action suit challenging the denial of equal protection for women in the Corps of Cadets at Texas A&M University.
Hankins was city attorney for the City of San Marcos for five and a half years. He was a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury and has been a regular contributor to The Rag Blog for the last four years.
Coming up on Rag Radio:
- FRIDAY, Sept. 26: Michael Harris, author of The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection, about living through the Internet revolution.
Rag Radio is hosted and produced by Thorne Dreyer, a pioneering Sixties underground journalist who was founding “funnel” of the original Rag in 1966 and now edits The Rag Blog and is a director of the New Journalism Project. Tracey Schulz is the show’s engineer and co-producer, Roger Baker is staff photographer, and noted investigative journalist Ken Martin is the Rag Radio apprentice.
Rag Radio has aired more than 200 shows since September 2009, on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, Texas. Rag Radio is broadcast live every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP — and streamed live on the web — and is rebroadcast and streamed on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EDT) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA. Rag Radio is also aired and streamed on KPFT-HD3 90.1 — Pacifica radio in Houston — on Wednesdays at 1 p.m. (CDT).
After broadcast, all Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.
Rag Radio is produced in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive Internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation.
Please contact us at ragradio@koop.org.
