Ghalgernon

Dude here. This is what I imagine the interview of the lone hero on that jury said to those harpy bitches: “You know what I keep hearing? That she was overwhelmed. Overwhelmed. Three children are dead, and somehow that word is supposed to make the room softer. She was overwhelmed. She was depressed. She was exhausted. Her hormones were wrong. Motherhood was difficult. Her drugs were wrong. Nobody understood what she was going through. Fine. Then stop telling me she was my equal. No—don't look away now. That's the bargain you've been demanding from us for fifty years. Women can do anything men can do. Women can command armies. Women can run corporations. Women can govern nations. Women can control nuclear arsenals. Women belong everywhere decisions are made because sex has nothing whatsoever to do with judgment, temperament, resilience, or responsibility. Remember? You don't get to abandon that argument the instant responsibility becomes unpleasant. This woman didn't forget her children in a hot car. She didn't make one catastrophic mistake in ten seconds of panic. She created time. She got her husband out of the way. She killed one child and still had time in which the universe could have screamed at her to stop. Then another. Then another. And afterward we're supposed to look at the bodies and discover that adulthood has a fucking asterisk next to it. Because she was overwhelmed. Do you understand what you're saying? If a woman can be entrusted with a nation when she's thriving but cannot be held responsible for her actions when she's collapsing, then you haven't described equality. You've described privilege. Authority without equivalent accountability. Power without equivalent consequences. Adulthood with an escape hatch. And America built an entire culture around that escape hatch. For decades we were told that holding women to different standards was sexism. Then whenever a woman failed spectacularly, suddenly treating her differently became compassion. Her emotions mattered. Her hormones mattered. Her childhood mattered. Her relationships mattered. The pressure mattered. The expectations mattered. Every conceivable circumstance marched into the courtroom ahead of responsibility and begged us to understand. But understanding isn't acquittal. Explanation isn't innocence. And compassion isn't the abolition of consequence. If a man deliberately sent his wife away, murdered their three children one by one, and afterward told us fatherhood had simply become too overwhelming, would eleven people in this room be searching for a vocabulary sophisticated enough to make him the fourth victim? Of course not. We'd call him a monster. Maybe that's exactly what equality looks like. Maybe equality means a woman gets to be a monster, too. And that's the thing this country became terrified to say. We spent half a century insisting women were strong while constructing an entire moral architecture around their fragility. We called them independent and rushed forward to explain their failures. We called them powerful and treated consequences as cruelty. We handed them authority while increasingly regarding judgment itself as some barbaric relic invented by men. Then we congratulated ourselves for achieving equality. Bullshit. Equality isn't believing women can succeed. Any coward can applaud success. Equality is believing women can fail. Equality is believing women can be selfish, calculating, cruel, incompetent, corrupt, cowardly and evil—and that when they are, they don't become helpless children merely because acknowledging what they did makes us uncomfortable. And before somebody gives me the inevitable speech: no, this woman does not prove that every woman is unstable. One murderous father wouldn't prove every man is unstable either. That's not my argument. My argument is that your defense of her proves something about you. Because you've spent decades telling me sex is irrelevant to whether somebody can shoulder the greatest responsibilities imaginable. President. General. Judge. Surgeon. Commander. Fine. Then sex is irrelevant here, too. You cannot tell me a woman is psychologically robust enough to have her finger on a nuclear arsenal on Monday and tell me on Tuesday that murdering her own children must be excused because the pressures of ordinary life shattered her. Pick one. If women are adults, treat them like adults. If women possess the resilience necessary to wield power, then demand the resilience necessary to bear responsibility. And if your answer is that we cannot demand that—if somewhere underneath all the slogans you really believe women are uniquely vulnerable to emotion, hormones, stress, motherhood, relationships, or whatever explanation we're using this week—then have the courage to follow your own argument to its conclusion. Because you don't get both. You don't get equality when power is being distributed and fragility when consequences arrive. That's not liberation. That's aristocracy. And maybe that was America's great mistake. Not giving women equality. Equality would have been easy. Equality has rules. We gave certain people something much more poisonous: the expectation that somebody else would always be responsible for what happened to them—and eventually, even for what they did to somebody else. Three innocent, loving children had to die before anybody in this room was forced to confront where that road ends. Eleven of you looked at those bodies and still found reasons she shouldn't pay for them. So call me cruel. Call me backward. Call me a misogynist. Christ, you've been waiting all afternoon to use the word. But I'm voting guilty. Because those children don't get another trial. They don't get a newspaper profile explaining their trauma. They don't get professors discussing the social forces acting upon them. They don't get another morning. She made sure of that. And if equality means anything at all, it has to mean that the person who took those mornings away from them doesn't escape responsibility because she's a woman. Otherwise stop calling women equal. Call them what you've actually made them: untouchable.”