I tried very hard to steer away from the Lindsay Clancy case, but it kept somehow getting thrust at me. If you are not already familiar with the details, I won’t resume them here – there are plenty of places you can go for the facts, and they are not really in contention. Short version: She strangled her children.
What is in contention is the nature of her culpability for what she did, and a wider conversation about the responsibility individuals – particularly women – bear for their actions. The debate spawned by this case is highly toxic, going well beyond a legal drama to touch upon the very roots of pharmacological agency and even the state of feminism itself.
Yes, it’s personal
I have a particular dog in the game. 14 years ago, my then wife was suffering from some form of undiagnosed postpartum depression/anxiety, which included psychotic episodes – in one of which she became convinced that her then 11 year old stepdaughter would do harm to her and to our infant son. Even now, I can see in Lindsay Clancy’s dead eyes the same stare my ex-wife held in court. The divorce was messy, including wild accusations that I had tried to harm her and threatened her life, none of which happened.
What made all of this worse was the pro-feminist bias exhibited by the courts. Though none of my ex-wife’s accusations had any substance to them, I still ended up losing any access to my son, who is now completely estranged from me. This happened because the state ultimately refused to withdraw custody from the mother, even after repeatedly chastising her for failing to facilitate the reconstruction of the father-child relationship. The fact is, if a mother is sufficiently dogged in her demands to maintain sole effective custody of the child, and consistent in her lies about her fears and loathing for her child’s father, all she needs is a good lawyer and determination. Ultimately, the mother has all the rights.
What’s good for the Spiderman is good for the black widow
But with great rights comes great responsibility. And that is perhaps why I am so offended by the female-led attempt to exonerate Lindsay Clancy of her crimes on the basis that she or any mother suffering post-partum depression cannot be held responsible for her actions. There is even a current of the debate that blames the father for somehow not stopping her.
Let’s be clear about this. If society should choose to white knight women by treating them as too mentally weak to uphold the most basic moral rule in our society, the logical corollary is that women should be considered incapable of assuming the responsibility of motherhood. If the state can’t blame you for strangling your kids, you shouldn’t get to have any paternal rights over those kinds (much less ‘all’ the default rights).
Instead we have reached what has always been the endpoint to which fourth wave feminism was driving us: a society in which the state grants to women all of the rights, but refuses to hold them responsible for anything at all. Even strangling their own children with elastic bands.
Feminists fiddle while Rome burns
Such a society is sick and will fail. The results are nowhere more plain to see than in the fertility statistics: In every country that has embraced fourth-wave feminism of this kind, birth rates are in free fall. It’s not difficult to imagine why – what sane man would want to be a father in a world where he has everything to lose, has no rights, and can even be blamed for the most evil action of the mother to whom those rights are granted by default?
So when people wonder why Western civilisation is being slowly replaced by cultures who refuse to adhere to feminist norms, they need look no further than into the dead eyes of Lindsay Clancy and the legions of her feminist supporters.
