Speaker A: Uh, a tourist in a small town is charged with a traffic offense. She asks her tour guide, is there a criminal attorney in town? The guide replies, yeah, but we can’t prove it yet.

Speaker B: Two.

Speaker A: Welcome to the Cross examiner podcast, the Internet’s courtroom in the case of rationality versus religion. Here, our host uses his experience as both an attorney and an atheist to put religion on trial. We solemnly swear that it is the most informative, educational, and entertaining jury duty you will ever do. And now it’s time for the cross examiner. Welcome to the Cross examiner podcast. I am, um, your host, the cross examiner. I am an atheist. I am an attorney, and I am alarmed. I’m alarmed by the rise of Christian nationalism in the United States, and I am more alarmed by the massive amount of misinformation that’s fueling that rise. I started this podcast to bring my expertise as an attorney and my life experience as an atheist to help entertain and educate you, to give you the ammunition to push back against that misinformation and to fight Christian nationalism wherever possible. I am going to be continuing my series today on faith healing in America. It’s the single best example I can give of this show’s motto of when you believe things based on insufficient evidence, you can hurt people. Right? And that’s where we’re going to go today. But first, I have two special announcements. First is I am going to be appearing on Truth Wanted. This is a show that’s put on every week. It’s a live call in show produced by the atheist community of Austin, ACA. If you are unfamiliar with the ACA, you should get to know them. They are a nonprofit, a 501 nonprofit out of Austin, Texas that is dedicated to the promotion of positive atheism and the separation of church and government. Well, those two things are kind of my jam here, so it’s kind of a perfect meetup to work with them. I have appeared on one of their shows previously, episode of The Nonprofits. There’s a link to that episode, and I’ll post this episode on my website at, uh, thecrossexaminer net. But please do check out ACA. They do a tremendous amount of work. I will be on Truth Wanted this week, which is, uh, June 9, starting at 08:00 P.m. Eastern. It is a call in show that talks about skepticism generally, not religion specifically, but there is a lot of discussion about religion, the basic premise of the show. It’s a call in show, and callers will call in and say, this is what I believe, and more importantly, why. That’s the conversation we want to have. Why do people believe the things they do? And we’ll talk about that. So please listen in. Call in if you want to say hi. I’ll be there again, 08:00 Eastern. Friday, June 9. On to my second big announcement. I will be interviewing on my next episode an attorney named Ryan Jane. You may not be familiar with his name, but you’re familiar with his work. He works for the freedom from religion foundation. FFRF. This is another organization that you should be donating to and familiar with. FFRF are the soldiers who man the wall of separation between church and state. You may remember Jefferson wrote about the wall of separation. Well, these would be the soldiers standing on top of it day and night, waiting to defend the country from invasion by those who would turn this into a religious theocracy. FFRF does many, many things, and we’ll be talking to Ryan Jane about his job there and the FFRF’s role in society as a whole on my next episode. So I’m extremely excited. I hope I don’t fanboy too much during the interview, because these, uh, guys are amazing. And Ryan has an amazing history. And most importantly, his capstone project during law school was about the medical neglect of children by parents for religious reasons. I e killing kids with faith healing. So we’re going to have a lot to talk about. I hope you tune in. But today we’re going to continue our discussion of faith healing in America, and we’re going to be focusing on a very specific aspect of faith healing, and that is an argument that is often overlooked most of the time when there are discussions. If you can convince a politician to even talk about this, which is hard, they will cite the first amendment, the free exercise clause of the first amendment. They’ll cite parental rights. They’ll say parents have the right to exercise their own religion, and they have the right and obligation to bring up their children in society and dictate or teach their religious beliefs, I would argue impose their religious beliefs on their children. So that’s how they frame the argument. Parents have the right and the duty to exercise their religion, and that includes praying for kids instead of giving them antibiotics. The issue that is overlooked that we’re going to be talking about today is what about the children’s rights? What about their rights to not die? So we’re going to talk about this. We have to talk about this before we can review the current state of the law. In fact, I’m sure we’ll review the current state of the law when we talk with Ryan Jane on my next episode. But we have to review the history of children’s rights to understand not only how bad it used to be, but how bad it still is to some degree. And I think you’ll agree by the end of this episode that more work needs to be done in this area, that children’s rights are still a young area of the law and needs to be fleshed out even more. So I’m going to start with something a little out of the ordinary. Well, not too out of the ordinary for me. As you may know, I’m a fan of musicals, and comedy, especially comedy musicals. So as I was researching this particular issue, I had a lot of flashbacks to a lot of musicals and movies that depicted child abuse in a fairy tale sort of way. You may be familiar with some of those depictions, and I’m going to play them now to remind us that we still have this lingering sense, this grims fairy tale sense of telling children stories about child abuse in a, I don’t know, a folk story sort of way. The Hansel and Gretel stories where the story itself is about abandoning children’s in the woods to die. And we tell these tales to kids. It’s been softened and whatnot. But I thought this would be a good way to sort of frame the discussion. So I’ll play a couple of clips, and this will be a quiz. You have to identify which movie or musical each of these clips is from, and I’ll introduce each one. So let’s start with the first one. Where is this from?

Speaker B: It’s a hard knock life for us. It’s the hard knock life for us.

Speaker A: That is from the musical Annie. And specifically bonus points if you identified it was from the 1982 version where Carol Burnett plays the evil drunk Miss Hannigan in charge of the orphanage. This is a trope we’ve seen in movies a lot, the orphanage where the person running the orphanage is a nasty, mean, cruel person. And that’s not too far off the mark, as I think you’ll see when we review the history of the United States, it’s still a real problem in America. All right, moving on to the next one. Where is this from?

Speaker B: Lisa I want some more. What? Lisa I want some more.

Speaker A: Any guesses that is from Oliver? The 1960, I think 460 ish somewhere in the 60s movie based on Oliver Twist. And that was Oliver saying, please, sir, I’d like some more. They’re given just a few spoonfuls of Gruel to feed them and the person in charge, sergeant in charge of the orphanage is outraged, uh, that he would dare even ask for a few spoonfuls more of Gruel. It’s a famous line. Please, sir, I’d like some more. Next we’re going to have a work that demonstrates two masters of this area. One is the actor who is a master at being a mean, vicious person. And the other is the author of the work who is a master at writing about mean, vicious treatment of children.

Speaker B: Listen, you little wiseacre, I’m smart, you’re dumb, I’m big, you’re little, I’m right, you’re wrong, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Speaker A: There’s nothing you can do about it. That sums up the line that little phrase is from, by the way, the 90s adaptation of the book Matilda, written by Roll Dahl, the master of writing children stuck in horrible situations stories. And that, Mr. Wormwood, is the character depicted by Danny DeVito. Of course, you probably recognize the voice as matilda’s father, Mr. Wormwood, the idiot, lying, deceptive man who is telling his daughter, deal with it. There’s nothing you can do about it. I’m bigger, stronger, smarter than you. You have to do what I say. That’s the history of child’s rights in America summed up in one line. So next, we’ve got a bonus. This is a tough one. You might know it if you’re of a slightly older generation like me when I was growing up. This depiction on screen was one of the most terrifying, nightmare inducing images and characters for children of all time. Let me know if you know who this is.

Speaker B: There are children here somewhere. I can smell them like cockroaches. They get under the floors, in the cracks, in the walls, in the woodwork.

Speaker A: Any guesses? Anyone know? That was the child catcher from the movie Chitty Chitty Bang Bang? Still gives me a little twinge in the back of my neck of fear when I see his visage. He’s got dressed in all black. He’s got this long, pointy upturned nose that’s just unnatural. And in the movie, he is the law enforcement for the kingdom that has outlawed children. Being a child is illegal in this kingdom, right? And the childcatcher tempts children with treats and candies and goes hunting for them in toy shops. The kingdom has a toy shop, of course, because it’s a kids movie, but it’s illegal to be a child. The toy maker is played by Benny Hill of UK comedy fame, and he actually does a great job, even though he’s a goof most of the time on his show. So bonus points if you got that one. Returning back to Matilda now, but a different version of Matilda. Tim Minchin, big fan of his, wrote a musical based on Matilda called Matilda the Musical. It was a huge success on the West End, huge success in Broadway, and Netflix last year turned it into a film. I highly recommend it. It’s wonderful. I recommend the stage play even more. I think it’s better than the film, but they’re both really, really, really good. This is a quote from a character in that film that quarter sort of sums up the popular depiction of British schools, especially during the see if you recognize this character.

Speaker B: What is the school motto, Miss Honey? Bambin est mcgetam. Bambonatum est mcgeetum m. Children are ah. Maggots. Thank you for bringing this one to my attention. I shall destroy it in due course. Good day.

Speaker A: Bambinotum est mageetum. Children are maggots. That is our school motto. That, of course, is the evil Miss Trenchbowl. Again, uh, written by Roll Dahl in Matilda, the book is just filled with horrible parents and horrible officials doing horrible things to children. And Emma Thompson’s portrayal of Miss Trenchbowl is pitch perfect. But I think I’ve saved the best for last. I’m not even going to quiz you on this one because this is brand new, and I honestly think that this is the single best on screen representation in a humorous way of where we have come from in the area of children’s rights in the United States. This is a scene from a new comedy musical series on Apple TV called Schmigadoon. You may be familiar with it. If you love comedy, if you love musicals, if you love musical comedies, you need to watch this show. If you have not done so already, it is hilarious. The first season there’s two seasons. The first season is all about the old Roger Stain Hammerstein era. The Sound of Music, king and I carousel those sorts of Oklahoma, right. Those sorts of musicals. The good old fashioned, good family values musicals. Period of musical history. Season two is called schmicago. And now we’re dealing with musicals from the where things have gotten dark and you start to get things like A Pippin and Chicago and a lot of Sondheim stuff like Sweeney Todd about a, um, barber who’s baking people into pies, right? He’s killing people and baking them into pies. Well, in Chicago, the parody, we have a similar situation. This is obviously an ode to that, and it’s sung and written in the style of Sondheim. But I need to set up the premise for you to really enjoy this. We have Christian Chenoweth playing an orphan headmistress along the lines of Ms. Hannigan in Annie. Christian Chenoweth, I’m sure you know her, even if you don’t know her. She originated Galinda in Wicked on Broadway. She’s, uh, been on a million Broadway shows. She was a big character on the show Glee. She’s a powerhouse singer, uh, and actress. She plays this headmistress, uh, opposite Alan Cumming, who plays a butcher. And the butcher can’t get any good meat. He’s a horrible butcher and there’s no good supply. This is a scene where the two start to compare their two problems, come up with a solution, and then sing a wonderfully, catchy, funny, horrible song about the solution. So I’m just going to play it, comment on it a little bit, and I think if you watch it, you’ll agree. This is the new standard. This is the standard for how we portray the horribleness of how children have been treated in this country. Because all of these shows that we’ve been listening to are funny because they have an element of truth. So here we go. Christian Chenoweth alan Cumming in Schmichago.

Speaker B: Horrible creatures, a lot of them. And they never fight. Me neither. That’s a shame. They’ve taken to these awful pranks. Switch my chin to water. They throw weaponly shoes. They’re dying of pneumonia. Piss baron. I’d get rid of a lot of them if I could. Disgusting. Get out. Get out.

Speaker A: You’ve got too many orphans.

Speaker B: I’ve got too little meat.

Speaker A: Do you see where this is going? Let’s continue.

Speaker B: What if, let’s say I could get rid of some of the orphans and you could get some mate at the same time? What exactly are you suggesting? Mr Blight? Mr Blight, you are in for such a treat. I have got some little dolls. Dolly France here, I bounce that I love for you to meet I’ve got.

Speaker A: Some kids I’d love for you to meet to turn into meet oh, such a great song. I’m going to play a little bit more because it gets even better.

Speaker B: Step right up so I welcome the light but to shop, what can we get for you today? Have you any ham? How about veal? Yes, thank you. Kidney, kidney, belly, calais. Lamb? That’s pam with some jam all in.

Speaker A: Chile as m she’s saying each name that rhymes with each meat she’s parading kids in front of him so he can evaluate them.

Speaker B: I’d love some ground beef weapon till you’re in luck. Which do you prefer? We go? Have you any mutton that will be starting? Perhaps some foie gras?

Speaker A: Baloney?

Speaker B: Tony. Salami, tommy and we’ve also got Ruben, if you like pastrami. But do you have minced meat? Well, since meat is fine, he’s not minced meat instead. Well, please, there are children present. Not for long, because we’re going to kill them and sell them as meat. Ain’t got no dad, ain’t got no mom but are they sad? Are they glor? Now they confront the world that’s fallen with the sweetest love you’ve ever made.

Speaker A: In case you didn’t catch that they say ain’t got no dad, ain’t got no mum but are they sad or are they glum? No, they confront a world that’s vile and mean with the sweetest smiles you’ve ever seen oh, they’re good enough to eat this whole scene if the song goes on, the kids are dancing happily as they’re singing about killing these kids and selling them for me and it works at so many levels. On one level, it’s just funny that the kids would be going along with this. Two, they’re so blatant about it when he says, oh, please don’t don’t say rude words. There are children present. And she says, not for long. That would be where the joke would normally end. And then he goes, no, because we’re going to kill them and sell them for meat. Literally saying exactly what they’re going to do to the audience and to her, just for some reason, just drives even further home. And the next level it works on is that last line I just quoted. They confront a world that’s vile and mean with the sweetest smiles you’ve ever seen they’re good enough to eat these tropes everything I’ve just played to you rests on that presumption, this depiction of the plucky little orphan that is taking this horrible situation and smiling and living through it. And this musical is saying, that’s bullshit, right? These kids would not be behaving this way. They’re sitting here doing like the kids end up doing a tap dance routine and everything. That’s not what’s actually happened and that’s not what is happening. So it’s hilarious on so many different levels. So I thought this would be a good way to remind ourselves that there are still these remnants in our culture of stories and this concept of, yeah, kids can be treated poorly. And Hollywood and our stories tend to tend to say that, uh, they’ll just power through it because they’re kids. I think as we review the history of child abuse and child rights across the world and through the United States, you’ll find that, no, they don’t. They can’t, they can’t fight about they’re powerless and they need we, the people, to protect them from evil parents. So that’s what we’re going to dive into. The rest of this episode is going to have an NC 17 rating because we’re going to have to talk about some pretty nasty stuff. So if you don’t like hearing stories about the facts of our world and what is going on and has been done to kids, you should stop listening now. All right, let’s go into the history. I’ll try to keep this at a high level and, um, we’re going to go far back and bring it all the way up to present. So we’re going to start with a passage that I found in the Bible when doing some research on this topic. This is an obscure passage. You may not be familiar with this because I don’t think very many Bible study groups are going to study this one. So I’m going to read first Kings 1634. It reads, in ahab’s time, heel of Bethel rebuilt Jericho. He laid its foundations at the cost of his first born son, Abraham. And he set up its gates at the cost of his youngest son, Segab, in accordance with the word of the Lord, spoken by Joshua, son of Nun. I’m not sure I got all those names pronounced correctly, but what’s going on here? What are we talking about? He laid its foundation at the cost of his first born son, Abraham, and he set up its gates at the cost of his youngest son, Segup. What this is a reference to is something called a foundation sacrifice. And those are sacrifices of people frequently in the Bible, children, when you are building a building or a fortress. And what people would do varies around the world. But we have found foundational sacrifices all around the world. They would take here my first born son and bury them alive in the foundation of a building or a wall. That was deemed to be important frequently to dispel a previous bad event or curse, as is the case here the reference at the end where they say, in accordance with the word of the Lord, spoken by Joshua, son of Noon. The story previously is from the book of Joshua, specifically Joshua 513 to about 627. The story is, you may be familiar with it. It’s one of many in which God instructs some of his followers to utterly destroy a city. In this case, we’re talking about Jericho. The story goes that, quote, both man and woman, young and old, and oxen, sheep and ass were slain. Everybody was killed except for Rahab, who had betrayed the city into the hands of their enemies so that it could be destroyed. And Joshua, upon destroying the city, declares, quote, cursed be the man before the Lord that riseth up and buildeth this city Jericho. He shall lay the foundation thereof in his firstborn, and in his youngest son shall he set up the gates of it. So that was the setup. And then later on, we have the story of Ahab, who rebuilds it. And what does he do? He buries his firstborn in the foundation, and he buries his youngest son in the foundation to get rid of this curse. So this foundational sacrifice practice has been around prior to these writings and has continued past the Bible. I found an interesting article that led me on a bit of a goose chase. This piece was dated from 19 nine, I believe. Yes, 19 nine. The entitle is foundations laid in human sacrifice parentheses illustrated and it was published in a publication that was called The Open Court. And I had to do some research on that. Turns out The Open Court is a, uh, publication that was published between 1887 and 1936. And it was, quote, devoted to the science of religion. The religion of science and the extension of the religious parliament idea. That’s a noble goal. The the religious parliament idea is this idea that the world’s religions should coexist. If you’ve seen the bumper sticker Coexist, they should meet. There should be dialogues between all the faiths. We should have this noble world where they use science to try to come to a common understanding, a, ah, grand unified theory of faith, so to speak. But this paper delved into subjects such as philosophy, history, the history of philosophy, Asian religions, culture, education, contemporary ideas of religion and philosophy. It also published reviews of contemporary works of theology, philosophy, science, and math. And that’s where I found this piece published in 1909, foundations Laid in Human Sacrifice. And it was not accredited to an author. It’s just listed as being published by the editor. But a citation I found later goes to Paul Keris, is listed as the author. And this details the excavation of the city of Gezzer. And the city of Gezzer. These archaeologists found these jars with infants in these foundations. And this is back in the 19 nine. The time of your Indiana Jones movies running through World War I and up into World War II is when Indiana Jones takes place, when archaeology was the new hotness. This is when people were going around and digging up Egypt, finding dinosaurs, all sorts of exciting things. And they found these jars in Gezzer, and they had infants in them and young children. And they contained, like many other sacrifices in history, food. So the idea is that these people were buried alive. And it might have been an honor back then when you read the paper. They’re sitting here pondering back in 1909, what was the mechanical method of doing this? Did you just kidnap people and do this, or was it seen as a place of honor? Their theory back then and given this is 1909, so we’ve got the whole imperialist west talking about the savages type of mentality, but credit to this publication trying to be more scientific. Their theory back then is that the further you go back in time, the more superstitious societies were, the more that they would view this as an honor, even the victims. The idea being that there was more certainty, that death was less important, that you would certainly be reborn into a spiritual body or some afterlife or something. But evidence is found as you move forward in time that there was resistance and fighting and that they had to tie people up to do this. These things are found around the world very frequently. Children are the ones that are buried, as you saw in the Bible. So in Jesus’s time, the story of the Bible, or this is Old Testament, so before Jesus, they’re talking about foundation sacrifices. There’s a reason you haven’t heard about that very much in your Bible study class. Isn’t that curious, right, that they’ll talk about cities of Jericho and the walls of Jericho fell down, but they don’t talk about this. They don’t talk about and Joshua said, if you’re going to rebuild this, you have to sacrifice your children and bury them alive under the foundations. But that’s what the Bible says. So that’s our starting point. Uh, our starting point is kids are objects that are used to ward off spirits or to bless buildings by burying them alive. So let’s jump forward to the time of Jesus when we’ve got the Roman Empire, and let’s examine what a child’s life might have been like at that time. And I’m going to crib from a book entitled Bad Faith. I may have mentioned it before. It’s written by Dr. Paul Offit. I’m using this book as my springboard. That’s what led me to this paper. When I started reading about foundational sacrifices, because he talks about it for a paragraph or two. I thought, this has got to be is he cherry picking history here? This is crazy. And I start doing all this research, and sure enough, there’s article after article after article. All during the early 19, hundreds of these archaeologists finding these child sacrifices in foundations of buildings and scratching their heads, going, wow, this is so much more prevalent than we had previously thought. So at the time of Jesus Roman Empire, infanticide was legal. Children were considered property of the father, no different than slaves. And for entertainment or as a pastime, children were stoned, beaten, flung into dung heaps, starved to death, traded for beds, sexually abused, sold into slavery, and, quote, exposed on every hill and roadside as prey for birds and food for wild beasts. Some boys were killed so that their livers or brains or testicles and bone marrow could be used as love potions when they had nightmares. When kids had nightmares, they would be beaten to get the devils out of them for entertainment. Girls were regularly raped and children were suspended on poles so that hyenas could tear them apart. When Emperor Diocletian fell ill in approximately 303 Ad. Anyone who didn’t sacrifice a child was immediately executed. That’s the state of children. Back then, infanticide was an everyday occurrence. One historian said it was, quote, the most widely used method of population control during much of human history, and it wasn’t unique to Rome. In the Arab world, parents regularly buried their infant daughters alive. This is a common practice around the world. We know that daughters were much less valuable than sons during the agrarian periods because they wanted people who were more likely to be able to help out on the farm or around the factory or workplace. So there was a pagan Arab ritual where when they would have a daughter, they would bury them in a pit to the point that mothers would give birth in a pit. And if it were, uh, to be a son, they would take care of them, take them out of the pit. But if they were a daughter, they’d just fill in the pit. That’s how common that was. Again, I strongly recommend reading Bad Faith by Paul Offt. He describes all of this in great detail. It’s quite shocking. But here is where we have to give credit where credit is due. If you look at the Bible, Jesus in his teachings, tells people to be kind to children. I found a few passages that hint at that attitude. For example, he said, suffer little children and forbid them not to come unto me, for such is the kingdom of heaven. That’s Matthew 1914 suffer little children. That’s the best we can come up with, right? Suffer, put up with. But it is improvement, right? Put up with kids, don’t torture them, don’t feed them to animals. So credit where credit to do on that one. Also we have whoever welcomes one of these little children in my name, welcomes me. Mark 937. And in the story where parents were bringing children to Jesus, mark 1016 says he took the children in his arms, placed his hands on them, and blessed them. So this is some evidence that the early Bible is focused on treating children not as objects, but as at least something worthy to be loved and protected to some degree. And we see this in the early days of the church. And when I say early days, I’m talking of like 300 BC. You remember Constantine? He was the first Christian emperor. And on May 12 of 315, basically state responsibility. For health and welfare of children was born, writes Dr. Offit, a direct consequence of the ministry of Christianity to Constantine. Constantine proclaimed, quote, let a law be at once promulgated in all the towns of Italy to turn parents from using a patricidal hand on their newborn children and to dispose their hearts to the best sentiments. Basically, infanticide was now a crime. And this was because of in some part. I have not done a ton of research here, but I want to give credit where credit is due because of the teachings of the church at the time. This is 300 years after the time of Jesus, right? And later on in 321, Constantine went further. He said, quote, we have learned that the inhabitants of provinces suffering from scarcity of food sell and put in pledge their children. We command that those found in this situation be suckered by our treasury before they fall under the blows of poverty. So, in other words, welfare. The earliest church effect on government is care for children, children’s rights, starting the very beginning of children’s rights and a welfare system. How different is this from the Christians we see in the United States today? It’s hard to overstate. When you read the Bible, there are hundreds and hundreds of passages praising physicians. Jesus was in favor of medicine, Jesus himself. Um, if you read the Bible, if Jesus is one thing, the character of Jesus, he is a physician, he is a healer. He is called that a lot. In fact, a, ah, historian, uh, Gregory Henry Payne wrote, amid all the differences of opinion and doctrine that we find among the early founders of Christianity, there was one thing on which they were unanimous, and that was the attitude towards children was a ceaseless war they waged on behalf of children. Those early and oftentimes eloquent founders from Barnabas, contemporary of the apostles, to Ambrosius and Augustine, they did not cease to denounce those who, no matter what the reasons, exposed or killed infants. So this is the beginning. Credit where credit is due. We have a, uh, history before this emperor of children being treated as objects. We have this moment in time, 300 Ad. Where a Christian emperor says, you know what? Maybe we shouldn’t kill kids. That’s the groundbreaking shape. This is just twelve years after the previous emperor grew ill and an order was initiated to say, everybody has to sacrifice a child or you die. That’s where we’re coming from. Now, I do have to back up and say, what is the causal direction here? We’ve got a chicken or the egg situation. Did the founders of the church fight for being kind to children because the Bible said so? Or do the writings of the Bible reflect this attitude? Because civilization had come further in time, further in development, and we started to get a better sense of morality. It’s entirely possible that the writers of the Gospels wrote these stories because they had this innate sense through being raised in their culture, that this is wrong. Treating children this poorly is wrong. So they add these lines about Jesus being the lamb of God, giving comfort to children, right? It’s also possible that they wrote that, because that’s the stories they heard given through oral tradition about what Jesus said, but we don’t know. And the reason we don’t know is we have no originals. We don’t know who wrote the gospels. Everybody says Matthew, Mark, Luke and John wrote the gospels. That’s not true. Open up any bible that’s got citations, it will tell you right there, we don’t know. It’s just attributed to those people because of church tradition. We don’t have originals. The gospels were written at least a generation past the time that Jesus existed. So that’s one sort of fact, arguing that these are folktales, right? These are fanfiction. Maybe there was a person named Jesus. Maybe it’s a sort of amalgamation figure. Who knows? But fan fiction comes along later, and the authors insert these attributes because as their culture progressed, as they learned more about morality, they’re living more together in cities instead of roaming nomadic tribes. They figure out, maybe we shouldn’t be burying our kids in pits if they’re girls. I tend to lead towards the people who were writing these documents at the time started to realize that this was a bad situation. And so they inserted these lines to show that their character was kind even to children and that that should be done, because we see that everywhere. We see the world sort of progressing. So how much change by the time the United States comes along, right? There’s a whole history here of children being objects for many years. By the time the settlers come, the puritans come to America, not much has changed. Legally, children were still the property of their father. It’s not until much, much later, after the founding of the country, that we start to see in the law a recognition that children actually have rights. So I’m going to go through that history here. For the remainder of the episode, we’re going to say, okay, where were we at the beginning of the country, and where did we end up? So the United States constitution was ratified in 1788. It was operative by 1789. So 1789, the country exists by that time. By 1800, is is the earliest records. I I found there were a total of eight institutions in the country for abused or neglected kids. Only eight. And in 1800, we had 16 states. So half of the states, and that’s presuming that there was one in every state. Half of the states had no organizations for abused kids. There was no government interest, no private interest, nothing for abused kids. If we jump forward three decades, three and a half decades to 1836, we see the first child labor law. This is Massachusetts, who creates a law where children under 15 who are working in factories have to attend school for at least three months a year. This is progress, right? That if you’re 14 or younger and you’re working in a factory, you have to go to school for three months, uh, nine months out of the year. You can work however many hours, 18 hours a day in a factory. And if you’re 15, you don’t have to go to school. But this is progress. 1836. Massachusetts, again six years later, is the first state to limit working hours for children, and they limit the hours to 10 hours per day. So this is 1842. Massachusetts breaks new ground by saying children can’t work more than 10 hours a day. So that’s 60 hours a week if you take Sunday off, 70 a week if you don’t. So jumping forward again, by 1850, there are now about 90 institutions for abused and neglected kids in the US. That’s a huge leap. In 50 years, we went from eight to 90 an order of magnitude more. And by that point on our history, we had 31 states. California joined in 1850 to make the, uh, 31st state. So 90 institutions across 30, 31 states. So about three per state. Massachusetts leads the way again. In 1851, they create the first modern adoption law. It passed in Massachusetts. It was the 1851 Adoption of Children Act, and it recognized adoption as a social and legal operation based on child welfare rather than adult interests, which is pretty unique. And it directed judges to ensure that adoption decrees were, quote, fit and proper, that people were not just giving their kids out or selling their children to the butcher so they can, OOH, they’re good enough to eat. That’s not going on. That the judges have the power to say, no, you can’t do that. This is not fit and proper. You’re not going to be good parents, basically. And then in 1853, we have something that’s both good and humorous. A person named Charles Loring Brace founds the Children’s Aid Society. It takes kids off of the streets in New York. It’s a homeless kids society to rescue them. But the reason it’s kind of humorous is the very next year, that man creates something called the Orphan Train. It’s exactly what it sounds like a train full of orphans. And this train would travel around the western states of the United States, offering orphans up for adoption. Orphan Train. Uh, orphan train. Their first album was pretty good, but you should hear their second album. Orphan Train is my favorite band by far. Orphan Train. It’s just such a weird phrase, but, yeah, it was the orphan mobile. They would drive children around who were homeless. So don’t get me wrong. They were trying to do good here, but who knows what rules were in effect or how discerning they were about who they were giving these kids out to? And surely the kids would end up going to work, right? I need some kids because I want to be a good parent, but I also need, ah, a couple of hands on the farm. And that leads us to perhaps the very earliest case I could find of a court deciding that they know better than parents who were abusing children. And this happens in 1869. It’s the case of Samuel Fletcher, Jr. So strap in for this one. Remember I said that there’s an NC 17 warning? This is a horrific case. So this is a case from the Illinois Supreme Court in 1869. The official name of the citation of the case is Fletcher v. People. The opinion was authored by Justice Lawrence of the Court. And I’m going to read it because you can hear this judge’s horror, uh, in his writing. So I’m going to start with a description of the facts of the case as it came to the court. Quote, it shows a wanton imprisonment without a pretense of reasonable cause of a blind and helpless boy in a cold and damp cellar without fire. During several days of midwinter, the boy finally escaped and seems to have been taken in charge by the town authorities. The only excuse given by the father to one of the witnesses who remonstrated with him was that the boy was covered with vermin. And for this, the father anointed his body with kerosene. If the boy was in this wretched state, it must have been because he had received no care from those who should have given it. In view of his blind and helpless condition, the case altogether is one of shocking inhumanity. The parents, Samuel and Ladisha Fletcher, were found guilty of false imprisonment. Now, false imprisonment, the way I learned false imprisonment in school, is that’s a tort. It comes from our common law. It’s the civil version, basically, of kidnapping. False imprisonment is you’re somewhere and you want to go away from that place, and I am preventing you, and I have no right to prevent you. I can sue you if you do that, right? If I’m in a store and the store locks the doors and say, we suspect somebody in here of shoplifting, so we’re locking the doors and we’re not letting anybody out until we find, until we search every bag, that’s false imprisonment here. It’s a criminal offense. So in Illinois at the time, there was some ability of the court to find, uh, uh, people guilty of a charge of false imprisonment. So we would call it kidnapping. This is not child abuse. They didn’t have that law on the books. So this is an example of the court stretching for different crimes to apply to a case of child abuse. So they found the couple guilty of false imprisonment for locking their blind son in a cellar for days on end in a dark heatless cellar in the middle of winter while his body was, quote, covered in vermin. Who knows? Lice bedbugs, something covered. And keep in mind, when they did that, they doused the boy in Kerosene to kill the bugs. So you’ve got a blind son that you throw in the cellar, doused in Kerosene, shivering in the cold, covered with bugs, and he has to escape to find help. Of course, this is abhorrent, but the judges don’t have a child abuse law. They can only say, well, you shouldn’t have locked them up that way. That’s false imprisonment. So that’s what they find they’re found guilty of. And they pay a fine of $300 each. $300 is a lot of money in today’s dollars. I, uh, looked that up on a calculator. That’s about ten grand. Ten grand each. So the family lost 20 grand for the crime of falsely imprisoning the kid. I don’t have any information as to what happened to the child. There’s not a story that follows this case. This case does cite an older case. They cite a case called Johnson v. The State, and the citation is two Humphrey 283. So when you hear legal citations, you’ll hear a number, a word, and then a number. The first number is the volume. The word is the name of the case reporter. So case reporters are books where we accumulate all the decisions of judges. So two Humphrey 283 would be volume two of the Humphrey case reporter page 283. I couldn’t find any reference to a Humphrey reporter. In fact, I reached out to the Case Law access project run by Harvard Law School and asked them, hey, I’m reading this case. I can’t find this citation anywhere. I’ve done my research. I’ve looked for English case reporters that are called Humphrey. I found one. But it’s all about property law. It doesn’t seem appropriate. I don’t see anything else in, uh, us case reporters. Do you guys know what the citation is? And they very quickly, to their credit, wrote back and said, no, uh, we actually are unfamiliar with this. The opinions from back here are often computer scanned in, so maybe there’s some sort of typo or misunderstanding or mistranslation. So I cannot find Johnson v. The State. This court cites it. It says, if the parent commits wanton and needless cruelty upon his child, either by imprisonment of this character or by inhuman beating, the law will punish him. Thus, in Johnson v. The State, the court held the parents subject to indictment because in chastising their child, they had exceeded the bounds of reason and inflicted a barbarous punishment. So there is an earlier case than Fletcher v. People, which is the Kerosene child, the blind, Kerosene soaked child in the basement. And that’s Johnson V. Sate. But I cannot find the life of me find the details. So in this time, we are seeing the very first instances of courts saying, you can’t do that. We don’t have a specific statue about beatings for children that it makes that as especially horrendous crime. So we’re going to use the regular crimes of false imprisonment, assault and battery, things like that. And then we get in five years later. So that was 1860, 918, 74. We have another case. And this is the famous case. Samuel Fletcher, the blind Kerosene boy, was the earliest I could find. But the famous case, the one that actually started affecting change, is the case of Mary Ellen Wilson. And I’m going to give you a lot of details here because it’s a fascinating story. The story of Mary Ellen starts with a dying woman. This woman lay dying of tuberculosis in New York City, and a Methodist missionary found her and asked if she could help. And the quote from this woman, as told by the missionary, is, my time is short, but I cannot die in peace while the miserable little girl, whom they call Mary Ellen, is being beaten day and night by her stepmother next door. The dying words of a woman who’s dying of tuberculosis to a missionary basically saying, you can’t help me, but please, for the love of God, help this girl. Mary Ellen living next door. And this missionary. Her name was Edda Angel Wheeler. She went to investigate. And the house, the apartment that, uh, was indicated by the dying woman belonged to Francis and Mary Connolly. And she made an excuse to go in and talk to these people. And she observed Mary Ellen, their daughter. And Wheeler said, quote, she was a tiny mite the size of five years. Though she was nine, she struggled to wash a frying pan about as heavy as herself. Across the table lay a brutal whip of twisted leather strands, and the child’s meager arms and legs bore many marks of its use. I went away determined, with the help of kind providence, to rescue her from her miserable life. She went to the police. That’s what she did. She made an excuse, went in, observed this, and were like, okay, we need to get this kid out of this situation. But the police couldn’t help her. The police told her, quote, unless you can prove that an offense has been committed, we cannot intervene. And all you know is hearsay, is what she said. So all you have is the testimony of the woman next door and you saw a whip on a table and a girl that looks malnourished. We’re not going to investigate no child protection services. The state is not interested in getting involved. If you’ve got evidence of a crime, we’ll do that. But as long as parents back then would keep their crimes behind closed doors, all’s fair, right? You can beat your kid as much as you want. So frustrated, Wheeler went to a variety of these societies that had been set up, that were benevolent societies. And they all turned her down, saying, well, we can’t go in. There’s no way for us to go in and take a child. In fact, uh, what she said is they said, quote, if the child is legally brought to us and is a proper subject, we will take it. Otherwise, we cannot act in this matter again. There’s no law to help this child. There’s no society that can leverage any sort of statute or regulation to even start investigating everybody’s hands off. So in desperation, she turns to a man named Henry Berg. Henry Berg, back in 1866, founded a society you may be familiar with the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals now called the ASPCA, the American Society. But the SPCA is what he founded. This is eight years before the Mary Ellen case. Eight years prior to that, we have a society for the Prevention of Cruelty to animals. He listened to this story and he said, well, if there’s no justice for her and this is a quote if there is no justice for her as a human being, she shall at least have the rights of the stray cur on the street. Think about that for a second. This guy’s saying there are no rights for children, but there are some rights for stray animals. So stray animals have more rights in his eyes at this point than children in America. So he takes his attorney, who works for the SPCA, and they pursue this to their utmost. And sure enough, they collect evidence and get the police to arrest the parents. And the trial was a media sensation. Among the first people to testify was Mary Ellen. And she testified the following court I have no recollection of ever having been kissed by anyone. I have never been kissed by my mama. I have never been taken on my mama’s lap and caressed or petted. I have never dared to speak to anybody because if I did, I would get whipped. This is her testimony, right, that she’s nine years old and she’s never even been kissed by her parents. All she’s had is whippings. There’s a man named Jacob Reese. He was a reporter, a police reporter, a police beat reporter describing the scene. And he wrote, quote, I was in a courtroom full of men with pale, stern looks. I saw a child brought in carried in a horse blanket at the sight of which men wept aloud. I saw it laid at the feet of the judge who turned his face away. And in the stillness of that courtroom, I heard a voice raised claiming for Mary Ellen the protection men had denied her. The story of little Mary Ellen stirred the soul of the city and roused the conscious of the world that had forgotten. And as I looked, I knew I was where the first chapter of Children’s Rights was written. This story dominated New York City newspapers for months. When it was over, Mary Connolly was sentenced to a year in prison. And EDTA Wheeler, the missionary, took custody of Mary Ellen and Harry Berg, who had founded the SPCA and used his money and influence and his, uh, attorneys working for him to save Mary Ellen, he founded the society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children, the first organization of its kind. And its mission statement was clear, quote, to convince those who cruelly, ill treat and shamefully neglect little children that the time has passed when this can be done with impunity. If that isn’t a line from a Hollywood movie of we’re coming for you, so you better run and hide, you child abusers, I don’t know what is. For the next 20 years, the society investigated more than 100,000 cases of suspected child abuse. The stories were shocking. Charles Flato, uh, the Saturday Evening Post, wrote a story, quote, children have been whipped, beaten, starved, drowned, smashed against walls and floors, held in ice water baths, exposed to extremes of outdoor temperatures, and buried with hot irons and steam pipes. Children have been tied and kept in upright positions for long periods. They have been systematically exposed to electric shock, forced to swallow pepper, soil, feces, urine, vinegar, alcohol and other odious materials buried alive, had scalding water poured over their genitals, had their limbs held in open fire, placed in roadways. Where automobiles would run over them, placed on roofs and fire escapes in a manner as to fall off bitten, knifed and shot, even had their eyes gouged out. The reports of injuries read like a casebook of the concentration camp doctor. This is the state of affairs when you have a country that does not have laws that protect children. This is what goes on in humanity, at least back then, and some would say in some part of humanity ongoing if there weren’t people trying to chase these people down and lock them up. So for the next, what was it, ten years, 20 years, they’re finding these cases. So all the way up till the turn of the century, till 1900. But we’re going to jump forward to 1930, because that’s the next major step in children’s rights, and it’s actually in the form of technology. So this is your question. I want you to think about this question. What invention came along in 1930 that helped people create more evidence that a parent had abused a child? 1930s. The answer the x ray machine let that sink in. I think you know where this is going. In the 1930s, we invented the x ray machine, and radiologists started noticing certain patterns on bones. Early on, they noticed these stripes or discolorations, and they even published about it. In 1945, John Caffeine, a radiologist at the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University, published a paper, the American Journal of Rotogenology. That’s what they called x rays back then, the science of x ray. And he described four children with, quote, thickenings in several bones. All four were less than three months old. And he wrote, quote, these patients suffered from none of the recognized conditions in which thickenings have been found previously. Such as, scurvy, rickets, syphilis, bacterial osteitis, which is bone infection, neoplastic disease, which is cancer back then, or traumatic injury. So we have three months old kids with these thickening of the bones that don’t have any of these diseases. The thickenings were a mystery, basically. And after a prolonged investigation of four patients, wrote KFI, the cause remained undetermined. Traumatic injury was not observed in a single case at home or in the hospital. So this is the earliest that we see of it’s been 15 years since the invention of the X ray machine. And now we’re seeing papers of doctors going, we’re seeing this phenomenon, these bone thickenings, and we don’t know what to make of it. Kaffy publishes more papers. The next year, he publishes, um, in the same journal, another report finding six more children with bone thickening in that paper. He believed them to be fractures, the result of fractures. They were accompanied by subdermal hematomas, which is the collection of blood between the skull and the brain. And he wrote, quote, some of the fractures in the long bones were caused by the same traumatic forces which were presumably responsible for the subdermal hematomas. Again, the parents appeared to be baffled, and Kathy noted that the children were frequently bruised, they were pale, they were malnourished, and they always got better in the hospital, and they got worse when they left. One child, in his report, returned after, uh, only a few days absence with five new fractures around the knee. Isn’t it perversely quaint in some way that these doctors are baffled by what they’re seeing? We take this now in our cynical society that has drawn back the covers from child abuse. We take this now as just given that, oh, this is child abuse. You need to investigate, and we need to take this kid away from their parent, right? Back then, he’s like, uh, this is a head scratcher. But when he sees this kid who leaves and comes back a few days later with five new fractures, he is suspicious. He writes, in one of these cases, the infant was clearly unwanted by both parents, and this raised the question of intentional ill treatment. However, he concluded, quote, the evidence was inadequate to prove or disprove this point. It wasn’t until ten years later, 1956 so my parents are alive, right? This is in my generation’s, collective cultural memory. 1956, a man named Fred Silverman published a paper entitled the X ray Manifestations of Unrecognized Skeletal Trauma. That’s the title of the paper. Now, unlike Caffeine, Silverman was pointing a finger. He said, quote, it is not often appreciated that many individuals responsible for the care of infants and children may permit trauma and be unaware of it, may recognize trauma, but forget or be reluctant to admit it, or may deliberately injured the child and deny it. Six years after that paper, a person named Henry Kemp published a paper entitled The Battered Child Syndrome. This is 1962. It’s taken us till 1962, nearly 100 years after the Mary Ellen case, for the scientific community to come up with a syndrome called the Battered Child Syndrome. This time, this paper was not published in some obscure radiology periodical. This was published in JAMA, the Journal of American Medical Association. It’s the most widely read medical journal in the world. And Kemp wrote, the battered Child Syndrome is a frequent cause of permanent injury or death. The syndrome should be considered in any child exhibiting evidence of fracture in any bone, subdermal hematoma, failure to thrive, soft tissue swellings, or skin bruising in any child who dies suddenly or where. The degree and type of injury is at variance with the history given regarding the occurrence of the trauma. What does that mean? The degree and type of injury is at variance with the history given regarding the occurrence of the trauma. The degree and type of injury is how severe it is. And being at variance means doesn’t line up with is different from the history given the story that the parents told. That’s a very medical term, that the injury, the degree of the injury is at variance with the history. So your medical history is when you go in to see a doctor, they’re saying, what can I help you with today? And you say, Well, I was walking down the street and I fell down and my eye hit the tree, and I have got a black eye. What he’s saying here is, when you see all of these conditions, or any of these conditions, you should, as a doctor, start considering Battered Child Syndrome. Kemp reported 750 children with X ray evidence of past abuse. 78 of those had died. 114 had suffered permanent brain damage. He did something that the other physicians did not do when he published this. It was accompanied with a press release. And within a few weeks, Time, Newsweek, Life, Saturday Evening Post, every major paper was talking about child abuse. One. One article was entitled Parents Who Beat Children. A, uh, tragic increase in cases of child abuse is prompting a hunt for ways to select sick adults who commit such crimes. And during the next 20 years, medical journals published more than 1700 articles about child abuse. So that by the mid 1970s, child abuse had its own medical journal. And guess who the editor was? Henry Kemp. The man who came up with the Battered Child syndrome. The man who decided to issue a press release and get in front of the cameras and start talking about this, its own medical journal. And he’s the editor. That’s a success story of a man who really helped millions, if not billions, of children. And Battered Child Syndrome is still working today, still used by doctors today as a diagnostic tool. So we’re at a point now where we can’t deny what’s going on as a country. X rays no longer allowed parents to deny what they’d. Been doing, and Congress started to take notice. And you may have heard of Senator Walter Mondale. Walter Mondale was a presidential candidate in my lifetime. He took notice, and he created the Subcommittee on Children and Youth. And he used that organization, that subcommittee, to try to mobilize Congress to protect children. And in 72, the subcommittee published a book entitled Rights of Children. And this sets the stage for what Mondale really wanted to accomplish, which was federal child protection laws, an act that it was entitled the Child Abuse Protection and Treatment Act. CaPTA cap. And in hearing testimony about CaPTA, the, uh, proposed legislation, he heard from many people. One person in particular was the founder of an organization, a new organization called Parents Anonymous. And it was for parents who would beat their children and needed to stop, just like Alcoholics Anonymous and all of those. And I, uh, won’t go into that detail. We’ve done enough of the horrific stuff. That person really swayed people over when they talked about their experiences. So CaPTA passes. So Nixon, who’s a mortal enemy of Mondale politically, signs the bill. And that leads to one of my favorite political quotes of all time. Mondale said, quote, not even Richard Nixon is in favor of child abuse. So, yes, thank you, Nixon, for signing it, but I’m still going to just burn you on the way out. So the bill allocated $86 million for a center within the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, what we now call Department of Health and Human Services. And it would compile a list of accident. Their mission was to compile a list of accidents involving children, publishing training materials for case workers and doctors, and creating a national commission to study the effectiveness of state surveillance of this issue. And by the mid 1970s, all 50 states had a mandatory child abuse reporting law. So this is 200 years approximately after the founding of our country, and we have the first federal law about investigating reporting child abuse. And unfortunately, we have to take a divergence here. This is going to be the last point into the area of politics and, uh, yet another example of how Christopher Hitchens was right when he wrote his book God Is Not Great how Religion Poisons Everything. And it’s because of the Nixon administration and what they did to this regulation. So you may be familiar with two people in the Nixon administration, halderman and Ehrlichman. They were senior advisors, and they were all wrapped up in the Watergate scandal. They were basically traitors to the Constitution. They were not only did they know about the burglary, they tried to cover it up, and Nixon was going down, and they knew it. They also happened to have two things in common. Actually, they had many things in common. Paul Offit, in his book Bad Faith, writes about their commonalities. Both were german by dissent. They were dubbed the Berlin Wall for their cover up. Their protection of Nixon. Both were heavily involved in the COVID up. Both were indicted, both were convicted, both went to prison for their crimes. And relevant to this story, both were Christian Scientists. The Nixon administration had an abnormally high number of Christian Scientists. We’re going to do a whole episode on Christian Scientists. But suffice to say, they practice faith healing. Devastating stories that come out of Christian Science about parents denying medical care for their children and those children dying. So Captain comes along and Halderman and Ehrlichman see the writing on the wall. They see that these provisions will be the death knell for Christian Science. So they spring into action. And in the regulations that are promulgated by Health and Human Services. They add the following language quote no parent or guardian who in good faith is providing a child treatment solely by spiritual means, such as prayer. According to the tenets and practices of a recognized church through a duly accredited practitioner shall, for that reason alone be considered to have neglected the child. Looks like they’re saying, if you’re praying for the kid and something bad happens, we’re not going to call that child abuse. They’re, uh, trying to make it sound like religious freedom. They’re making this exemption. Here’s the problem, though. As Dr. Offit writes in his book, they tipped their hand. Only Christian Scientists would refer to their prayers as quote treatments and to faith healers or pastors or prayer, uh, givers as quote practitioners. And only the Christian Science Church, quote, accredits, uh, its healers. So let’s read that language again. No parent or guardian who in good faith is providing a child treatment solely by spiritual means, such as prayer treatment, according to the tenets and practices of a recognized church through a duly accredited practitioner. Again, only Christian Science uses these terms shall, for that reason alone, be considered to have neglected the child treatments, practitioners, uh, accreditation. This is Christian Science language. So Halderman and Ehrlichman insert this mandate into this regulation. Now, this regulation is technically optional, if you understand our federal system. The federal government can put out a bunch of laws for federal jurisdiction, but they can’t dictate what, uh, a state’s laws are. The state is responsible for taking care of child welfare. The state is responsible for the speed limit. The state is responsible for hiring and police and what they can do. So if you’re familiar with how the feds coerce the states on one view, or convince the states in a different view, they will condition the grant of federal funds on the states accepting certain regulations and enforcing them in their own states. So, for example, when the federal government wanted to raise the drinking age to 21, they said, okay, you don’t get any highway funds unless you raise the drinking age. And all the states raised their drinking age because they want that sweet, sweet highway fund money. Same thing here. You don’t get any of this money for your programs related to child abuse, related to Health and Human Services programs. The whole bill that came out of here unless you include this exemption in your state laws. So every single state except for one, included this Christian Science exemption from child abuse law in their state laws. And that one state was Nebraska. So props to them. So what happened is, about ten years after that, this is 84, department of Health and Human Services realized the absurdity of this mandate. They removed it, but it was too late. As Paul Offit says, the damage had been done. And this is a very important lesson. This is a very important lesson that these two people had a moment, they had the ability to force their religion into our laws. They had a very small moment and they took it. And we have a society, we have a legal system that is built for stasis. It’s built for log jams. We need a tremendous amount of consensus at the federal level, at the state level to change major laws. So they took their shot and it struck a bullseye. Every state but one now protected the medical neglect of children for religious reasons. All because two Christian Scientist nut job felons had no problem manipulating the system, motivated by their religious desire to sneak in protections for their entire religious organizations so they could keep on killing kids. There is no dispute about this. I’m not twisting the facts. Read this anywhere. This is why this is important. You elect people for the normal stuff. What is our economy going to do up and down? What is jobs looking like? What’s our national security? But the power you give these people is so immense that this is a problem they generated back in the 70s when we were trying to fix the problem, CaPTA was a solution to parents abusing their kids. And these religious nut jobs said, uhuh uh uh uh. We want to keep doing it. So we’re going to sneak this little requirement into the funding part of the regulation so we can keep killing our kids. This is why voters need to be educated. This is why we do this podcast. You need to know the facts. And to this day, even though Health and Human Services removed it, by 84, to this day, only about 19 states have removed it from their laws. 30 still have it in some form or another. In some form or another 30 states in this country, you cannot prosecute parents for child abuse if their children are suffering because the parents are doing faith healing. In at least three of these states, idaho being the leading one, it’s a, uh, pure defense to abuse, to manslaughter, and even capital murder. This is what religion does. This is what I mean by christopher Hitchens was right. You should read his book god is not great. How religion poisons everything. Because even if you are a good person, and you happen to be religious. Religion can make people do horrible things, and it made these people kill their children. It made these people, it made Ehrlichman and Halderman take their shot and subject children across the country to the risk, the very real risk, that they can be killed by their parents, for their parents crazy religious beliefs. And to this day, we have thousands of children who have died because of what they did. So these people, if you didn’t think that these people were scum for what they did to the country under watergate, hope for now you realize that these are the worst of the worst type of people. They take these opportunities and they insert these laws and they change something in our national structure, and then it’s hard to take back. It’s so hard to take back. Go back to my very first episode where I talk about the McDonald’s hot coffee case and how the rich and powerful corporations, tobacco companies, tried to use that and successfully did to pass what they called tort reform and trick everybody into thinking that that was a good idea. We still have that idea present in our laws. There are still so many states that have caps on damages, unreasonable caps on damages, where, let’s say a child who needs millions of dollars of care for the rest of their lives because their OBGYN was negligent, and the most they can get is a couple of hundred grand, and it puts the kid right back on welfare or out in the street. That’s what these people will do. They take their moment, they change the law, and then it takes generations to change it back, which is why the current court is such a terrifying prospect. The current court is changing First Amendment law, and they are enabling the intermingling of religion and government to a level we’ve never seen before. And we know that this brief moment that Mitch McConnell has worked for for decades is not going to last for long. But it’ll last long enough to change things until I’m long dead and gone, and possibly till my children are dead and gone, until we can fix what’s going on right now. So forgive me for going on a bit of a rant. This is the lesson of the podcast, right? That if you aren’t keeping an eye on this stuff, if you let people, if you trust people, if you take their evidence without skeptically reviewing it, they are going to steal you blind, both from a financial perspective and from a legal perspective, from your rights. So where does that leave us? Why do we still have these laws on the books? This history is ancient times. Children were property before our country was founded, but in the colonies, children were property. 1874 is when we very first start seeing that, hey, parents are abusing kids, then that’s not right. We should start fixing that. And 200 years later, after the founding of our country, we have this act, Captain, this amazing act, and it is sabotaged by these religious zealots. And the states now have these laws on the books that say you can kill your kids. That’s okay as long as you do it because you’re religious. So what do the defenders of this say, right? What do people say when they are asked, why do you support this as a politician? Right? In Idaho, they had a big movement to try to get rid of this multiple times, and it gets voted down with numbers like two thirds of the politicians saying, no, we should keep these exemptions. And they always couch this as a parental rights issue, right? They say this is the parents rights for religious freedom. This is a free exercise case. This is a First Amendment case of them exercising their religions. There’s never a discussion by the majority, by the conservative Christians about the children’s rights. So we are still in a world today where these religious zealots will deny the rights to any children to be free of this, to even enter the discussion about children’s rights. It’s all about we need to give cover to our Christian brethren. None of the people in the Idaho legislature who voted to keep this active time and time again, this exemption active, none of them are out there killing their kids. None of them are faith healers, but they’re Christian. And because they’re Christian, when a law comes along or a bill comes along that will negatively affect a fellow Christian, they feel compelled to give them cover. And this is one of the reasons that atheists will point to frequently that religion is bad. Even if you are a mild Christian, even if you’re a good person, right? The vast majority of people who are Christians are very good people, wonderful people. Many, many of my friends are good Christian people. But there is this fellowship, there is this brotherhood, and we see it in the Idaho legislature when they are given the opportunity to save the lives of children. Because the evidence suggests that when you pass laws saying, nope, you can’t do this anymore, it’s not like the parents are going to keep doing it and go to jail. Some might, but the vast majority stop their behavior. In fact, there’s many stories out of the Christian Science religion that if the law is in fact repealed, that the parents will find that as a relief. Now I have an excuse to do this. So this cover is definitely killing kids that would not otherwise be dead. Idaho’s refuse to do that because their politicians are Christian and they feel like, HM, maybe I think it’s a good thing, but if I do this, my opponent’s going to say, look, you’re attacking Christians and the voters are not going to stand for it. They’re all good Christian people. None of them are faith healers, but they don’t want these crazy Christian faith healers who are killing their kids to be negatively impacted by the government because they have this giant chip on their shoulder. This giant persecution complex that we’ve seen time and time again. Feeling like any reasonable steps to give children rights not to be killed by their parents is an intrusion by the government on their fellow Christian brothers. That is why being Christian in and of itself can be dangerous, because you find yourself in bed with these nut jobs and your politicians go along and support them. That is the state of children’s rights right now. There have been lots of cases in front of the Supreme Court about parental rights. And when I say lots for the Supreme Court, there’s multiple, at least four or five multiple others. There’s no right of a parent to kill a child. There’s no right of a parent to hurt a child. There’s none of those cases. There’s no cases about children trying to emancipate themselves because of faith healing. None of that has made it. The cases that we find in the Supreme Court are the first one I found for parental rights was post World War I. There was a law in a state that said you can’t teach German to your child right. That was found unconstitutional parental rights. I get to raise my kids the way I want. There’s a couple of other cases that have to do with education. I want to pull my kid out of school at an early age. I’m agrarian. I’m an Amish farmer. I want to pull my kid out of the age out of school at the age of 15. I have the right to do that. The Supreme Court agrees. There’s another case that says the state said I have to go to public school. I want to send my kid to a private school. Supreme Court agrees with that. The final case was in 2000. I think Troxler, I believe, is the name of the case where a mother whose husband had passed away didn’t want the husband’s parents to have contact with the kids. And there was a law in the books that said a judge may order visitation. They had the power that’s the law. And Supreme Court said, no, the parent gets to raise the kid. Interestingly, in Troxler, Scalia writes in his dissent, and he has spoken publicly about this, he points out there is a no enumerated right in the Constitution for parents. The Declaration of Independence talks about your right to marry and raise your kids and be a parent, but they didn’t include it in the Constitution. And based on that, he would hold that the state does have the right to come in and say, yeah, it’s in the best interest of the kid to visit his dead father’s parents, their grandparents. But the majority said no. There’s a lot of reasons Scalia, uh, is wrong, but it’s an interesting observation, especially if you’re looking for the support to say the state has a right to come in and say, no, you can’t practice faith healing on your children. So these are the laws that are out there. We don’t see the same level of cases reaching the Supreme Court about children fighting back against this sort of stuff, children having a voice. And don’t get me wrong, I am a parent. I don’t want my kids making life and death decisions all the time. But we should look as lawyers, we should look for these cases. We should be reaching out as community activists to children of faith healing parents and trying to see if there’s family members around who can bring these cases and say there’s an unacceptable attack on these children’s rights by these laws. I talk about this more with my interview with Ryan from Freedom from Religion Foundation. That’s going to be my next episode. In fact, next several episodes. I encourage you to tune into that one. I will leave you with this thought. Thank you for sticking with me. This is probably the longest episode yet. This is the episode I’m most passionate about. This is the example when I say, if you believe things based on insufficient evidence, you can hurt yourself or others, this is it. These people believe that they need to pray to heal their kids. We know that prayer doesn’t work. The politicians know that it doesn’t work. But the politicians let it keep happening because they believe that there’s some sort of Christian thing they have to follow. The parents keep killing their kids because they believe it’s a test or whatever to get them into heaven. And what it is in reality is it’s a modern day foundational sacrifice, just like those kids we talked about at the very beginning, dating back thousands of years. The superstition that I have to kill my child to make this building safe or blessed. These people believe they have to kill their child to prove that they are worthy of getting into heaven. This is no different than foundational sacrifices of children, and that’s how it should be framed. This is the same superstitious activity, just under a different light and with the blessing of these Christian politicians who are too timid to stand up to fellow Christians who are burying their children in the foundation of their faith. That’s what’s going on in America, and we need to put a stop to it. I’m going to end on a fight anthem. I am going to end I’m going to bring this together with a song from Matilda the musical, the movie version. There is a song in there called Revolting Children, and it’s a play on words. The children are revolting is in their disgusting, as we’ve seen in all those clips I played back at the beginning, right? Children are revolting. The orphan headmistress can’t stand them. The childcatcher needs to lock them up. The father of Matilda finds her disgusting and strangely smart, which is just a bad thing for a child. Miss Hannigan wants nothing to do with them. They’re disgusting little children. They’re like rats. The children are revolting. But in this song, it also means the children are rising up. The children are fighting back against that arc of our history, that long, long path of child abuse, child neglect, child sales, and child death. So this is the fight song that ends the show, where the children have overthrown Mist Trenchable and they are taking back their schools and demand that they get an education and they be made safe from abuse. I can’t think of a better anthem for this movement. I hope it gains traction. I think this is how this song should be used. Here it is. We’re going to take a listen to it at the end of the show. Thank you for listening.

Speaker B: Children living in revolting revolting children as we’ll have to start school vaulting we revolting we are revolting children living in revolting right. We’ll be revolting children till our revolting song as we’ll have to jumping we revolting become a screaming pause. Take out your pocket and use it as M A floor. Uh. Never again will we be ignored. We’ll find out where the door keeps your root pictures on the bar. If you’re doing something weird about it, we can actually out how we like if enough of us are wrong. Wrong. It’s like everyone S-O-R-T-Y. Rich, naughty, inside the line. If we disobey at this game, there is nothing that a judge will can’t do. Anything. You finally baby. I love me. I did you have it for you. We are evolving we are revolting children they are all things for you again.

Speaker A: M. Thank you for listening. I’ll see you next time on the Cross examiner podcast. This has been The Cross Examiner Podcast, the Internet’s courtroom in the case of rationality versus religion. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider subscribing. See you soon,

Speaker B: Sam.