I am a believer in the Hellenic faith. What this means is that unlike Christians or other monotheistic people, I believe in the Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Greece. This allows me to take an extra close look at personal responsibility and science.
As a believer in the Hellenic faith, you look to the Cosmos. This is the belief that everything is made up of scientific matter that is inter-connected. Therefore, in the ultra technical mode, or in I Heart Huckabee speak, “The universe is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.”
Now, taking my beliefs into account, let’s say I went on a sexual rampage and started making babies. I had five kids, and while mentally unstable, I was coherent enough to concoct a murder plan to rid the world of my kids. I would do so in honor of Zeus and with hopes of sending them to be little Gods on Mt. Olympus.
How long do you think it would take for them to bring back the electric chair for me? My guess is not that long. When I heard that Andrea Yates, the Christian mother who killed her kids to offer them to God before they could commit sin and face Hell, was found not guilty, I cannot explain how much faith I lost in the criminal justice system.
As a person who wanted to be a criminal justice professional in psychology and forensics, I feel we need to break this down a little bit. The charges in this case were for first degree murder. This calls for premeditation to be present. The former Mrs. Yates did, in fact, commit premeditated murder when she waited several days to drown her kids.
She admitted, on previous occasions, that she knew it needed to be done after her husband went to work, but before her mother-in-law showed up to help her with the kids for the day. She also admitted to trying to kill them before, but was stopped from carrying out the plan when her mother-in-law showed up. Obviously, this rules out the random act of insanity through rash, unplanned actions while ignoring the logical thought process.
It also technically rules out insanity. Insanity, by definition, means that a person does not know right from wrong. However, she knew not to try to drown her kids in front of other people, thereby proving she knew that Mommy was being a bad, bad girl.
Breaking it down even further, I would be willing to wager that the jury of Yates’ peers were in fact largely Christian, thus making her arguments more acceptable. What greater sacrifice could a Christian mother make than to be condemned to hell to send her children to heaven?
However, I do briefly remember some crock-filled line in the Bible about being accepted into heaven no matter your sins as long as you accept Jesus into your heart. Therefore, Andrea could still have a place in heaven. This alone makes me happy that I don’t subscribe to theories based on diatribes without logic that were once written by repressed and ashamed homosexuals (see King James).
The conservative feminist rhetoric supporting Andrea Yates is simply unbelievable. In fact, when I read it, I could not decide whether to laugh or find a Bible and throw up on it. I feel sorry for the Christians that are somewhat mainstream, because the loud mouth Fundies make them look like…well, another species.
The conservative feminist view seems to be that poor, repressed Andrea did the only thing the Fundies would allow her to do…become a murderer. Imagine this scenario played with the dramatic piano line because, yes, it is dramatic.
The story goes something like this. In order to be a good, Christian fundamentalist woman you need to subscribe to the following beliefs:
Birth control is wrong and each child is a gift from God that you should openly accept.
A woman needs to be at home to raise her children, where she belongs, and her family needs to come before anything she does for herself. (Fair enough, after all if you do the position you should do the time).
A woman should consider homeschooling as opposed to public schooling (which Andrea did) because the public schools lack Christian raining and teaching.
A woman needs to be submissive and leave all decisions to the man in the household.
The family needs to subscribe to a small and unorthodox church because larger churches are unable to carry the true weight of the fundamentalists and “true” word of God.
The belief that materialism is the root of evil and to be a good Fundamentalist you need to travel light and have only the bare necessities.
The idea that emotional abuse is expected because women caused sin as begun by Eve. Furthermore, the lack of hand-holding and reassurance that mothers need is not an option.
Andrea wholeheartedly subscribed to the fundamentalist beliefs that helped her to rid the world of her kids, while removing the choice of right and wrong from them. As a result, the conservative feminists believe we should take pity on her because while God is good, some aspects of his religion are not.
Please keep in mind that we have to understand being not guilty does open her up to eventually leaving the mental hospital she is in. As she has not attempted to denounce her religion, there is nothing to say she would not repeat her actions with another husband, another set of children, and another church, somewhere down the line.
However, unlike the whining, self-absorbed, ignorant Christians who choose to believe that we should blame the fundamentalists, I for once, need to disagree. It was not fundamentalist beliefs that killed the Yates children. It wasn’t even God or the true and utter belief that heaven is the way to go. It was Andrea who killed her children. It is women like Andrea who kill their children every day and go on to blame it on their own personal savior.
Perhaps this is why I do not understand. As a polytheist I have learned the art of self-responsibility. I have learned that it would never be acceptable to blame Zeus, Athena, and the other Gods for my own personal failures. In order to honor them I must be true to myself and see life as a celebration and a journey that only I am responsible for living.
No excuse makes up for the lives that she and other mothers like her choose to take. The only fair sentence would have been death. If there is a heaven out there in the cosmos that I hold so dear, I hope the gatekeeper is nicer to the jurors of the Yates case and other similar cases, than I would be, because in my eyes they are accomplices to murder, every single one of them.
Technorati Tags: Fundamentalist Christianity, Murder, Babies, Children, Insanity, Andrea Yates, Mothers who Murder, God, Jesus, Religion, Zeus, Polytheism
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