Kairos Center co-director Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis was interviewed by Truthout on the recent resistance to the AHCA and how it intersects with poverty, housing rights, and other social evils, and why this means we need a new Poor People’s Campaign:
[J]ust the day before I and others were arrested last week, we were participating in a housing rights, a tenants’ rights march, and in jail, we actually connected up with folks that were committing civil disobedience around anti-militarism. Then on Monday, Rev. Barber and I and others led a group of clergy around a press conference and then we actually had a meeting with the High Commissioner for Human Rights at the United Nations, making the connection between voter suppression and the attack on our democracy that is taking place right now … trying to see these connections between voter suppression and the denial of health care and the low wages that people are fighting [for], and trying to pull all of this together — all the issues into what we’re seeing as the need for a poor people’s campaign, a national call for moral revival, where we connect these different issues and the groups that are impacted directly by these issues and pull them together into a large movement, a fusion movement that works across race and geography and issues into something that can be a powerful force and kind of finish some of the unfinished work that Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was doing in the last year of his life. Fifty years later, we see that need to connect systemic racism, poverty and ecological devastation into a large movement and campaign to bring people together.
Read the rest of the interview here.