Millions of American women are celebrating a victory of sorts this weekend — a hung jury in the Lindsay Clancy trial.
The case’s future is uncertain. It will likely be difficult to find enough jurors capable of coming to an unbiased decision after the entire country has been riveted by this trial.
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It appears that 11 members of the jury favored some form of leniency, whether a not guilty by reason of insanity verdict or a lesser conviction, while one male holdout forced the jury to hang. He was, it appeared, a modern-day “Juror 8” from the famous play Twelve Angry Men — but in reverse.
This is a victory for Clancy, whose team will now enter either another trial with the prospect of another sympathetic jury or plea negotiations with the upper hand.
It’s one step forward for Clancy, but one step backward for womankind. In the aftermath of the death of famed feminist activist Gloria Steinem, women have found ourselves set back generations, at the hands of Steinem’s proteges.
Growing up, we were told we could do anything. We could be an astronaut, an engineer, a surgeon, or even the president. Now, apparently, the game is off.
Do you want a space shuttle piloted by a woman who could experience such extreme hormonal mood swings that she could snap and murder everyone else on board?
Would you trust a building engineered by a woman whose judgment can be clouded by a cocktail of SSRIs and other mood-altering medications?
And when the first female commander-in-chief decides it’s time to go to war with Paraguay, should the generals ask: Madam President, are you sure — or are you just mad because you’re PMSing?
Here’s the latest on Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial:
It’s not just in the professional realm that Lindsay Clancy has set back womankind. In the most important way, Clancy and her supporters have endangered the most sacred role a woman can ever hold: that of a mother.
Across social media during the trial, legions of mothers posted in support of Clancy, claiming they could easily have been her. They discussed their own postpartum struggles and, inexplicably, suggested that those struggles made them somehow “vulnerable” to the same affliction they say drove Clancy to murder her children.
Despite lying to providers about the fact that she was a threat to herself and others, and despite never presenting with postpartum psychosis, Clancy was, we now know, indeed a deadly threat.
And now, every time a woman presents with depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, or intrusive thoughts, a cloud of suspicion can hang over her.
Clancy’s supporters claim that her husband Patrick never should have left her alone with their children. But follow that argument to its logical conclusion, and millions of American men have not only license but a responsibility to restrict their wives’ freedom with their own children.
Clancy’s supporters have greased the slippery slope, and they won’t enjoy the ride to the bottom.
If Patrick Clancy didn’t do enough, then the argument holds that any woman experiencing serious postpartum struggles should lose custody and unsupervised visitation. Mom is too volatile to be trusted with her own children; better leave them with Dad, who isn’t susceptible to the violent hormonal and psychiatric instability we have just spent months being told can overtake a mother without warning.
For decades, feminists fought against the idea that women were too emotional, too hormonal and too unstable to be trusted with the same responsibilities as men.
Gloria Steinem’s generation demanded that women be judged by the same standards as men because women were equally capable of meeting them.
Now, thanks to their empathy for one woman, Lindsay Clancy’s defenders are making the opposite case: that a woman’s hormones, biology, and mental health can render her completely incapable of controlling herself, so much so that she can’t even be held responsible for the murder of her three children.
Congratulations to Lindsay Clancy’s defenders. They may have helped hang a jury. But in the process, they resurrected the oldest argument against female equality — and dressed it up as feminism.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
