There is a row of women in pink standing outside a courthouse in Plymouth, Massachusetts.
They have signs with them. They speak to journalists about support, about the system, about how we "have to believe women". The sun is probably shining, as it does in late August, and if you didn't know better, you might think this was a demonstration for maternity leave or against healthcare cuts.
It is not.
I'll come back to them.
Inside behind the walls sits a woman who, on a January evening in 2023, sent her husband out for food and medicine, and who during the hour he was gone, strangled her three children one after another with her exercise bands. Cora was five years old. Dawson was three. Callan was seven months old. One after another. Afterwards she jumped from the second floor, and she survived, as mothers in that situation strikingly often do, while the children, as children in that situation never do, did not survive. They were found in the basement. By their father when he returned.
Let us begin with what cannot be discussed, because everything that can be discussed tends to devour everything that cannot.
There exists NO excuse for that act. Not illness, not sleep deprivation, not hormones, not a system that failed, not a diagnosis with a Latin name.
An explanation is not an excuse, and the difference between the two is not law, it is civilisation. The explanation tells us how something could happen. The excuse tells us it was alright that it happened.
The trial in Plymouth is about the former - about whether Lindsay Clancy's mind was so broken down that the responsibility cannot be borne by her. That is a legitimate question, that is why we have courts - and twelve people under oath must answer it, not I, so I abstain from that. But regardless of what they answer, the act remains, untouched by the answer. Three children were deprived of life by the one who gave it to them. That does not become less true because of a diagnosis, medication error or a breakdown. That does not become less evil because the one who committed it was perhaps, herself, Evil's first victim that evening.
There exists in addition a judgment no courtroom can pass, and no acquittal can overturn. Regardless of what the twelve arrive at, she is the one who must wake every single morning for the rest of her life, with that knowledge in her body - that her hands, one after another, closed around three small throats she herself had kissed goodnight. Those images will not be tried by any instance. They serve their sentence in her. And perhaps that is the truth about Evil, when it has finished using a Human Being - it does not leave its servant, it leaves its witness - strapped in a chair, with the rest of a life to rewatch what no one should see.
Because this is where I'm heading, and I'll gladly say it without circumlocution again.
I believe Evil is real.
Not as metaphor, not as a psychological residual category for what we cannot explain, but as a force with will, a force that does not create anything itself, but that finds what is created and turns it. Including language. And the Word.
The strongest bond humanity knows is the bond between a mother and her child. If you wanted to demonstrate that nothing is Sacred, that nothing holds, that even the innermost can be turned into its opposite - where would you strike? Precisely there. Evil does not copy, it inverts. It takes the hand that is created to protect, and closes it around a child's throat.
And having written this, I'll ask you to notice something, because it happened in the courtroom itself, which almost no one registered. The defence psychiatrist, a recognised forensic psychiatrist, a person from the most secular profession in the most secular space our civilisation has built, was to describe what happened to Lindsay Clancy that evening. And he said - and hold on here - that it was "as if she was a puppet, and someone else was pulling the strings."
Someone else was pulling the strings.
Ok.
He meant it, we must assume, as an image, naturally. But notice what happens in that sentence - when science's own language had to carry what took place in that house, it did not reach.
Serotonin did not reach. Hormones did not reach. Sleep deprivation did not reach. Collapse did not reach. Nothing reached as explanation. And so he reached, under oath, for the oldest vocabulary we have - possession's. He smuggled metaphysics into the same sentence his field has spent a hundred years denying it. Not because he believes in it. But because no other metaphor fit what he had seen.
The Old Language knew what it spoke of. The new language borrows from it, every time reality becomes too large.
But Lindsay Clancy is not the story's actual horror. If she was sick, and much suggests she was, then she is a tragedy - a Human Being whose mind became an open door, and we do not know, and will never know, what walked through it.
Her own husband, the one person on earth with the greatest right to hatred in all of this, says that he was not married to a monster, but to someone who became sick. That sentence must be allowed to stand. Illness can be explained, perhaps treated, perhaps judged. It is, with all its horror, something we know.
The story's actual horror stands outside. In pink. In the sun.
And so we are back at the demonstration.
Because the women outside the courthouse have no psychosis. They are healthy, well-educated, well-meaning, many of them are mothers themselves, one of them is a doctor and says it to the camera - "we have to believe women". And this is where I believe every one of us must stop at that sentence and feel what has happened to it.
"Believe women" was created as a shield for victims - for the woman who told about the assault and was not believed. That was the sentence's entire meaning - it stood between the victim and the world's pat on the back to the perpetrator. And now the same sentence stands outside a courthouse and points at the female perpetrator.
The words are identical. The direction is reversed. The shield that was forged for the victims is now held up in front of the one who strangled three of them.
What kind of inversion is that?
Is it evil?
It is not compassion's fault. The compassion is real, and that is precisely what is uncanny. Evil does not invent feelings, it redirects them. These women feel something true - that mothers are betrayed, that postpartum depression is real, that the system does not catch those who fall. All of that is correct. But somewhere along the way the true feeling was disconnected from its object and harnessed to identity instead.
The category "woman" became more important than the three concrete children who no longer exist. And the category proved strong enough to swallow them.
NONE of the pink signs carry the children's names. Try to let that sink in. There is a demonstration at a triple child murder case for the murderer - and the only ones no one demonstrates for are the children.
The Old Gaze saw three victims and an act that screamed to heaven so the whole thing tore apart. The New Gaze sees one woman and a system that failed her.
The Old Gaze could hold both - the grief over the children and the mercy toward the sick - because it had a hierarchy - victims first. The New Gaze has lost the hierarchy, because it has lost what the hierarchy rested on - yes, now I write it again -
That each of the three children bore God's image and had infinite value in themselves, not as accessories to an adult's story.
Remove Imago Dei, and children become precisely that - supporting characters in the narrative that has the strongest identity category behind it.
For a civilisation always springs from its people's souls, as the river from its source - if the source becomes muddied, nothing downstream can run clear. Nothing falls externally before something has fallen internally - the walls are not breached until they are abandoned.
And the inner fall has its own order, which can be read in language - "courage" becomes embarrassing, "duty" becomes oppression, "faith" becomes superstition, "self-control" becomes a trauma you need help processing.
Each word turned, one at a time, until the good stands back as what you must apologise for.
So yes, we stand in a spiritual war, whether we want to or not, whether we know it or not. And our enemy is not primarily of flesh and blood.
That is the Old Language's oldest insight, and this case shows why it never became obsolete - the enemy does not show up itself. It uses. It perhaps used a broken-down woman in a house in Duxbury, and it certainly uses healthy people in the sun outside - their compassion, their sense of justice, all the best in them, harnessed to a wagon they cannot see.
The front does not run through Lindsay Clancy, she is terrain, not combatant, and her soul is for God and twelve jurors to deal with.
The front runs through the healthy. Through the movement that can stand beside three children's death and first and foremost see an issue for adults. Through a community so occupied with believing women that it has forgotten what it means to mourn over children.
The illness in the basement has a name, a diagnosis and perhaps a treatment.
The one in the sun outside has none of those - and it is contagious.
There exists no mask to strap across the face against that kind - the immunity is internal, and it is called what it has always been called - calling things by their right names.
So let us begin there, you and I, with the three names no one wrote on the signs.
Cora. Dawson. Callan.
Mourn them first. Everything else can wait.
We will take care of what follows afterwards.
❤️🔥🪽
