Should Courts Protect Children from Religion?
Thank God I'm Atheist
TGIA Media
4.7 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 19 December 2025
⏱️ 72 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What happens when a custody dispute turns into a fight over whether a child is being harmed by religion—and the courts are forced to weigh in? This week, we dig into a disturbing custody case that forces an uncomfortable question into the open: should religion get special protection when kids are the ones paying the price?
We also cover the Mormon Church's latest branding hypocrisy as it pressures independent podcasts to stop using the word "Mormon," a Utah high school administrator delivering a religiously loaded pep talk that shames struggling students, and a World Cup Pride match in Seattle that sends Iran and Egypt into predictable outrage. Plus: Florida and Texas label a Muslim civil rights group a "terrorist organization," the Catholic Church is forced into a $230 million abuse settlement, and new Pew data reveals that religion's long decline in the U.S. may have temporarily stalled.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey everybody, buddy, buddy. |
| 0:18.9 | Hi, friends. |
| 0:20.1 | Well, from beautiful Salt Lake City, Utah. |
| 0:23.2 | It's, thank God, I'm atheist. |
| 0:24.9 | Where we, a couple of atheists, try to make sense of life here in these United States of America. |
| 0:31.6 | I'm Frank Feldman. |
| 0:33.0 | And I'm Dan Beecher. |
| 0:33.9 | And coming up on the show today, Dan, we're going to be talking about |
| 0:37.8 | getting kids out of bad churches, especially in certain sort of, you know, what, how do you do that? |
| 0:49.1 | It's a conundrum of parental rights. Yeah. What happens if the person, the other person in charge of your child is, uh, is, is, is damaging |
| 1:00.8 | your child's mental, uh, life. |
| 1:04.9 | Yeah. |
| 1:05.8 | Uh, by taking them to church. |
| 1:07.4 | And these two non-parents are going to dig deep into this. |
| 1:09.9 | You and I are every bit as |
| 1:12.8 | qualified to talk about parenting as, I don't know, the Vatican or whatever. And they freely |
| 1:19.1 | talk about it. They talk about it all the damn time. So I figure, fair play to us. We're going to talk |
| 1:26.4 | about it. All right. Well, good. So stick around. You're going to talk about it. All right. |
| 1:27.8 | Well, good. |
| 1:28.7 | So stick around. |
| 1:29.8 | You're going to not want to miss that one. |
| 1:31.8 | Oh, my gosh. |
... |
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