Tuesday, November 23, 2004

Child murder in Texas: Is this progress?

Again we have a mother who murders a child in the throes of post-partum depression. And again I fear that her fellow citizens will want to burn her at the stake.

More than 30 years ago, I lived outside Jackson, Michigan, near a woman who had murdered three of her children, slowly, with a knife, while suffering post-partum depression. Yet in her case, as I wrote in Lansing City Pulse, the courageous local prosecutor chose not to prosecute her.

In this era, with toxic right-wing radio, would he be able to withstand the outcry? Is this progress?

1 comment:

Mark Pettigrew said...

Should the woman be burned at the stake for killing her child? No, of course not. Her punishment should be comparable to the punishment a man would receive for committing a similar act. Or is that too reasonable for a liberal such as yourself?

I find it fascinating that liberals who claim to believe in sexual equality seem to believe that women should get some kind of free pass, when it comes to homicidal acts against their own children, on account of lame excuses like postpartum depression.

(I'm not denying that postpartum depression exists, by the way. I am denying that it exempts women from the laws of civilized society.)

Either gender discrimination is OK, or it isn't. You liberals want to have it both ways. You (as a group) claim to oppose gender discrimination. Nothing could be less true. In reality, you love gender discrimination, as long as it benefits women, not men. It's only when men are the beneficiaries of such discrimination that you oppose it.

The logical inconsistencies of such a position are big enough to drive a truck through, but then again, logical inconsistencies have never bothered liberals very much, anyway. Just look at John Kerry, Bill Clinton and Jesse Jackson. All three have publicly acknowledged that human life begins at conception (which is kind of hard to deny, after seeing 3D ultrasound imaging of an unborn child in utero), but they insist that abortion should nevertheless remain legal.

I guess that if one is willing to tolerate an act which has taken roughly 40 million human lives since it was legalized in 1973, a little infanticide every now and then doesn't seem like such a big deal in comparison. But for those of us who still have a conscience and a brain, it's appalling.