pat: A Different Subject
He probably should have known that something was wrong with her and gotten her help.
PROBABLY? You know, Pat, it always strikes me as odd when feminist issues arise, that your attitude toward what a woman has done/should do is as black and white as Meme mentions, but the man's moral onus is always somewhat comme ci comme ca. PROBABLY? The guy had five freaking children with her and had seen her go through this to varying degrees (some, from what I have read of what their friends and relatives said, just as bad) before. He should have never left her completely alone with the children.
However, it was never alleged that he kept her pregnant against her will, or forced her to home school the children.
To someone with the perspicacity to see, which you apparently lack or prefer not to use, there are all manners of psychological coercion. In addition, I believe she was raised within this same sort of crypto-fundamentalist milieu and met her husband socially within it, and I'm sure it was drilled into her from an early age that her "godly role" in life was to be the "helpmeet" of her husband and the dutiful and submissive mother of his children.
The worst that can be said of him is that he was not very bright if he missed seeing what was happening if it were that obvious.
You toss that off so nonchalantly, as if it was like saying he was a bad barbecue chef. It WAS obvious that it was happening, the woman was in treatment for her postpartum depression and had been for some time. It's one thing to be "not very bright" and another to trust in the Lord to put the fire out if you insist on smoking in bed.
As for NOW and others supporting her: any sympathy I might have had for her died with her children.
Get real, man. You never had, and were never going to have, ANY sympathy for the woman; you'd never even heard of the woman until the story hit the news.
>>Do you think that a mother who kills her five children and then calls the police is acting rationally or in a normal state of mind? -- Meme<<
I don't think that anyone who kills other than in self-defense or war is acting rationally. There are too many other options available.
Actually, you nailed it with your first three words, "I don't think...". As Meme makes clear in her later response to this shallow and obviously not well considered statement, you must not differentiate between all the various types of homicide for which the law already provides.
An armed robber who shoots his victim dead so as to not have an identity-witness is acting rationally. A hired killer who whacks his victim for thousands of dollars is acting rationally.
However, the meaning of "rational" can in no way be stretched even in these days to describe the actions of a mother, previously known to be devoted to her children, who snaps and methodically kills them out of a demented, and equally devotional, desire to see that they are guaranteed entry into Eternal Paradise rather than run the risk that their exposure to her "unfitness as a mother" will somehow damage them morally.
The only difference was three children.
A clear indication of how little real thought you've given to either case.
She had enough control to get the children one at a time, and to chase at least one child around the house and drag him/her to the bathroom to kill.
More evidence of how a piss-thin awareness of human psychology is a dangerous thing. People like you are always thinking that someone who has become legally insane means that they're completely illogical. The reality is that the hallmark of serious mental illness is that the sufferer's behavior is perfectly consistent with their internalized view of reality, and follows what would otherwise be objectively logical paths. Just because you're a crazed sexual nazi who believes women are all murderers by virtue of having wombs that they do not keep constantly filled with fetuses by having sex with you doesn't mean you can't construct a perfectly serviceable bomb with which to attack a reproductive services clinic. {Meme, sassy -- don't ask me how I know that, 'kay?;=)}
Whatever the psychological reasons, 5 children are dead, and that woman killed them without mercy.
And -- again -- you clearly haven't been following the case, or you'd know (as I outlined above) that in fact Mrs. Yates committed the murders precisely out of a misguided, demented sense of mercy for her children's immortal souls.
To a normal person, that would be hell on earth. To a woman who could casually drown them one at a time, it is not enough.
Tell us something, Pat -- are you really such a damnable ignoramus in real life, or do you just play one on this board? Earlier, you described her as getting the children one at a time, even chasing one down and dragging him to the bathroom tub, but now you describe her actions as "casual", as if she was wiping dust from the furniture.
There is no justification for what she did.
HELLLLOOOO! Has anyone, anywhere, tried to provide a 'justification'? There's a difference -- although I'm not entriely surprised that you don't seem to know it -- between an 'explanation' and an 'excuse' and "justification".
She is as much a serial killer as Ted Bundy or any other, and no lesser sentence than death would be justice.
And you're about as much of a moral arbiter as Bundy! Bundy murdered upwards of 50 women, all of them for his own sadistic pleasure, all of them total strangers. The simple fact that you can't seem to perceive the difference is an indication of your own debased moral extremism.
All I can say, old son, is that it's damn lucky for you that back during your 'outlaw' days you didn't get into with some drunk in a bar over something he said and swing at him and kill him by accident. In most courts, that would be considered voluntary manslaughter. In YOUR court, since it would not have been done either in war or self-defense, you'd be on death row.
The ACLU is anti-Christian in every case I've seen.
That's undoubtedly because the kinds of 'Christians' you hang with are such hostile threats to civil liberties of other Americans. However, if you really knew the history of the organization -- oh, but why try to enlighten anyone who's having so much fun in the dark?
NOW has no other stake in this other than defending the right of a woman to kill her children, before or after birth.
Aside from saying "what sassy said" about "what Meme said", the stake NOW has is in seeing to it the American legal system recognize and accept the reality of post-partum depression syndrome as a genuine mental condition under which the sufferer is unable to adequately distinguish right from wrong, much the same way a person who had committed murder under the influence of a drug slipped into the punch at a church social would be innocent.
In this, they are dutifully following the lead of their founder and hero, Margaret Sanger.
Why are none of us surprised people like you can't tell or don't know the difference between NOW and Planned Parenthood? Just FYI, cowpat, NOW was founded in 1966 by over two dozen women, the most prominent being Betty Friedan. Sanger was not among them -- at the time, she was on her deathbed, dying of arteriosclerosis.
As for that link -- yeah, I'm sure we can rely on a sexual fascist website to NOT quote her out of context. But, just the same:
Yes, Margaret Sanger on occasion said some damned dumb things, and consorted with eugenicists like Havelock Ellis, mainly because many of the interests and concepts she was trying to promote on behalf of all women were literally decades ahead of being recognized as a necessary part of a truly civilized society, and few people were involved in those fields at the time -- and very unfortunately, some of those happened to be Nazis. However, I'll compare her lifetime accumulation of "Oops--wish I hadn't said thats" against Jerry Falwell's, or either of the Bushes, any time. The difference at the end of it all is -- humanity as a whole is immeasurably better off for the efforts of a woman like Sanger, and that's true whether men like you take the time to become aware of it, or whether women like Anne Coulter, who wouldn't be anywhere on the same continent with where she is professionally today, can bear to accept it.
