Point of Inquiry

To discuss last week's Supreme Court decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, Point of Inquiry welcomes Dr. Brian Leiter, law professor and philosopher at the University of Chicago. He's the author of several books including Why Tolerate Religion?. He blogs at Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog.

Leiter and host Lindsay Beyerstein discuss what the Hobby Lobby decision means for women's health, corporate personhood, and the separation of church and state.

In 2013, Leiter headlined a daylong symposium with the Center for Inquiry (the organization that produces Point of Inquiry), and you can watch the video here.

Best known for his 17 years as a talk show host, Montel Williams is now bringing his name and dynamic personality to activism on behalf of U.S. servicemen and women. Raised during the height of the Civil Rights Movement and into the tumultuous sixties, he joined the Marines as a young man and enrolled at the U.S. Naval Academy, earning a Bachelor of Science in Engineering. After spending years as a motivational speaker and talk show host he returns to his roots in supporting U.S. military men and women after their return home. Williams has put his weight behind a petition to the White House and a campaign known as #VASURGE in an effort to push the federal government to reform and improve the Veterans Administration, a crisis that has reached its boiling point after years of overlapping American wars.

We evolved to eat berries rather than bagels, to live in caves rather than condos, to sprint barefoot rather than wear sneakers—or did we? These, along with many other questions about what is or is not "natural" for humans from an evolutionary perspective and is the subject of the new book by biologist, Dr. Marlene Zuk, Paleofantasies: What Evolution Really Tells Us about Sex, Diet, and How We Live. The book was recently long-listed for the Royal Society's Winton Prize, one of the most book prizes in science writing.

Dr. Zuk is an evolutionary biologist and behavioral ecologist at the University of Minnesota, where she heads the Zuk Lab. She has published many papers and books on evolution and evolutionary biology.

Lindsay interviews her about the book with a view to the "Paleo" craze in health and nutrition, asking if we really know what some claim we do about our paleolithic ancestors and what impact, if any, that knowledge should have on our lives.

Few intra-party political battles have been as astonishing and unexpected as last week's primary loss by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor to religious-conservative challenger David Brat, who was quickly embraced by the Tea Party after his victory. To discuss what this means for the future of the GOP, and how religion has waxed and waned as a factor in American politics, Point of Inquiry welcomes the great political analyst Howard Fineman. Howard Fineman is the editorial director of The Huffington Post Media Group, an analyst for NBC News and MSNBC, former senior editor and columnist for Newsweek, and author of a best-selling book about political history called The Thirteen American Arguments.

This week POI welcomes bestselling author and trans rights activist, Janet Mock. Janet is the author of the new memoir Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love and So Much More, which recounts her emotional and physical transition from an infant sexed male at birth in Hawaii in 1983, to a young woman in New York City. Some traditionalists accuse trans activists of playing games with language when they insist on the right of trans people to be called by their preferred pronouns and to be treated as real members of their self-identified gender. Traditionalists claim that anatomy at birth is the only "real" litmus test of gender, despite the empirical evidence calling that simplistic formulation into question. Trans activists and allies are throwing the burden of proof back on the claimant. Why should the traditional ideology of gender take precedence over the lived experience of trans people? It's great to be skeptical of ideas that are obviously dubious, like astrology or Bigfoot. But skeptics should also use their critical thinking skills to scrutinize divisions that seem intuitive and natural, especially in face of evidence that old social norms aren't working, or are causing unnecessary suffering. We still live in a culture that would rather discard trans people than grapple with the challenge they pose to the traditional conception of gender, but activists like Janet Mock are trying to change that.

This week, we welcome Negin Farsad, a groundbreaking Iranian American comedian. A TED speaker and TED Fellow, she was named one of the Huffington Post's 50 Funniest Women. She's been seen on Comedy Central, MTV, CNN, MSNBC, and in her movie The Muslims are Coming!, a documentary following some of the funniest Muslim comedians as they travel America's Red States, cracking people up and demolishing stereotypes.

Host Josh Zepps and Farsad discuss everything from the gray areas in religious identification, to the situation for Muslims in post-9/11 America, and the theocracy in Iran. How does one of the best educated and culturally Western populations in the Middle East coexist with the theocratic totalitarianism of Iran's regime? What can Western liberals do to help moderates in these countries lessen the influence of Islam's radicals? Does any cultural action on the part of the West do more harm than good? And just what can you do with two masters degrees from Columbia? Apparently, comedy!

This week, Point of Inquiry welcomes Dahlia Lithwick, Senior Editor and Legal Correspondent for Slate, where she writes the "Supreme Court Dispatches" and "Jurisprudence" columns. Her legal commentary won her a National Magazine Award in 2013. She is a graduate of Stanford Law School and she joins Lindsay Beyerstein to talk about the crisis facing capital punishment in the United States. Almost all executions in the United States are performed by lethal Injection but America's go-to lethal injection drug cocktail is rapidly becoming obsolete because a key component is no longer readily available. States have been reduced to scrounging drugs from unregulated bulk pharmacies and experimenting with secret and untested mixtures of medications, a practice that may amount to cruel and unusual punishment. On May 21, the U.S. Supreme Court stayed the execution of Russell Bucklew of Missouri, just two hours before he was scheduled to be executed for the murder of Michael Sanders. Bucklew suffers from a condition called cavernous hemangioma, which means that his brain is a swamp of blood-vessel based tumors where drugs could pool or leak during a lethal injection. Bucklew's lawyers argued that Missouri's secret lethal execution protocol risked causing their client an agonizing death. They cited the example of Clayton Lockett, an Oklahoma inmate who took 43 minutes to die last month, during a botched execution, a death so horrific that the State of Oklahoma suspended executions pending an investigation. Lithwick and Beyerstein discuss immediate practical crisis of capital punishment, as well as the larger moral and legal issues surrounding the death penalty.

Our guest this week is Farzana Hassan, a Pakistani-Canadian political scientist, a columnist for the Toronto Sun, whose new book is Prophecy and the Fundamentalist Quest: An Integrative Study of Christian and Muslim Apocalyptic Religion.

Hassan joins Point of Inquiry's Josh Zepps to talk about issues surrounding Islam, in particular the difficulty in honestly dealing with terrorism and extremism and their relation to Islam, and the fine line between legitimate criticism and Islamophobia. Hassan, herself a Muslim, suggests that there exists doctrinal support within Islam for many of the terrible acts we see today done in its name. Hassan and Josh discuss whether moderate Muslims are serving as a cover for the extremists, or whether bridges should be built for moderate Muslims as the means to limiting the influence of radicals. Hear all this and more on this week's Point of Inquiry.

Our guest this week is Donald Prothero, paleontologist, geologist, and author of the new book Reality Check: How Science Deniers Threaten our Future. He's an expert on the effect of past climate change on the fossil record, as well as the co-author of Abominable Science, a skeptical look at cryptozoology and cryptozoologists with Daniel Loxton. Science Denialism is a many-headed hydra that rears up when people don't want to believe what science tells us. In this day and age, science has enough cache that educated people don't openly reject it when it tells them things they don't want to hear. Instead, they imitate the trappings of science to advance a political agenda. There was "Big Tobacco" making up fake science and slandering critics to convince the world that smoking is good for you, then there were the apologists for nuclear proliferation, spreading bunk science about the survivability of nuclear war. When the courts decided that teaching Genesis in science class was unconstitutional, fundamentalists got busy manufacturing pseudoscience in the form of Young Earth Creationism and later Intelligent Design. Vaccines have slashed childhood death rates worldwide but some people still aren't prepared to accept this fact, and prefer to fixate on pseudo-scientific conspiracy theories. Perhaps the most dangerous example of science denialism is the fossil fuel industry funded campaign to convince the public that climate change isn't real. Host Lindsay Beyerstein discusses all this and more with Donald Prothero.

Our guest this week is Cara Santa Maria, contributor to Al Jazeera America's science show TechKnow, and the host of the podcast Talk Nerdy. This neuroscientist, science educator, producer, writer, and television personality has brought her intelligence and insights to the Huffington Post as its former senior science editor, was the co-host and producer of TakePart Live on Pivot TV, and has appeared countless times on CNN, FOX, BBC, among many others. Point of Inquiry’s Josh Zepps sat down with Santa Maria for a conversation about growing up Mormon in Texas (and the associated postmortem planetary inheritance), the scourge of false equivalency in modern journalism, and the appeal of “woo” from the metaphysical to the pseudoscientific. And just what are our prospects for scientific advancement, and who will benefit most? This is an episode full of fun and eye-opening insights.