The trial wouldn’t let go of my wife.
For the last month, she was heavily invested in what would come of Lindsey Clancy.
It took me a while to understand why.
Maybe it was the charges.
Maybe it was the spectacle of the online debate.
Maybe it was the dread that it could happen to any mother.
But I finally saw what she saw at the outcome. And not just the 11 jurors willing to acquit someone who confessed to premeditated murder of her children.
It was the support group that popped up to rebrand Lindsey as the victim.
It was the thought premeditated evil isn’t evil if there are enough extenuating circumstances.
In short, no one has agency. And that’s something I can’t go along with.
Yes, postpartum psychosis is an issue. I’ll get to that in the next article.
Right now, it’s better I start with morality.
By any other name
Why there?
Morality goes deeper than commonly accepted practices. Some things have an inherent rightness or wrongness to them.
Like unalienable, God-given rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.
Feelings and conscience can point to those practices. But they don’t take their place.
Feelings can change. With intense enough devotion, feelings can even be turned off.
After that, we’re only left with the will to power.
But what doesn’t change is the inherent dignity and value of human life. Stop defending that and find how out of control a society can get when it comes after your value for its own convenience.
See what a decade of these policies have done to Canada
So all this talk about morality is great. But what is morality?
Three simple things
The week before jury deliberations, the Catechism in a Year podcast got on this very subject.
Call it synchronicity.
“In order for an action to be morally good, the object chosen has to be good, the intention has to be good, and the circumstances have to be good.”
From The Catechism in a Year (with Fr. Mike Schmitz): Day 236: The Morality of Human Acts (2026), Aug 24, 2026
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Sit with that for a minute: A good intention can’t make a bad act good.
Killing your kids so you no longer have to protect them to free yourself up for suicide isn’t a good intention or a good act.
Putting the blame on the medical system that overmedicated her when she was looking for any way out to defend that via extenuating circumstances is further not a good act.
Those are band-aids.
Loss for words
But why were 11 jurors prepared to accept a band aid?
If the criteria is that clear, why did the jury struggle with it?
Christian Smith published a fascinating study on this in 2003. Surveying 18-29 year olds, he found 60% had neither the ability or categories to make moral decisions.
What are the consequences of that?
“We want to be able to be people who have the ability to identify good and evil so we can choose good over evil. That’s the whole point in so many ways. But if I’ve lost the category of objective morality, right?
From The Catechism in a Year (with Fr. Mike Schmitz): Day 236: The Morality of Human Acts (2026), Aug 24, 2026
If all I have is pluralism, all I have relativism, right? It’s all the same. You do you, it’s all the same, no big deal.
Just don’t hurt anybody. Then we’ve given up our freedom.”
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What happens If we lose the language of morality?
Our views reduce to preferences or utility.
That begs the question: Is murder okay because of “feelings”? Even if they result from a debilitating condition?
Or is justice to protect the defenseless?
And can we do that without a language of morality?
The holdout
That leaves us with the lone holdout on the jury. The guy who forced a mistrial.
What makes his guilty verdict a moral act when the other 11 voted to acquit?
He looked at the situation and applied those criteria.
The morality of choosing an evil object, like someone who confessed to first degree murder of her own children, doesn’t make acquitting her a moral action just because she’s already gone through enough.
If we don’t uphold that in the Lindsey Clancy case, how can we stand to uphold it for future mothers whose instincts fail them?
How can we turn to them and say, “We’re strong enough to support you in raising your kids” when we accept they can justify killing then at any time for any reason because biological “experts” allow it?
But that inconvenienced the other jurors. It kept them in deliberations for a whole week. And at the end of it, they called him arrogant.
But that should be an example of what it takes to stand up for what is right.
And we should choose it anyway.
Not all lost
Only after we’ve lost an inherent good do we often realize what good the good was doing us.
But it’s never too late to reclaim that. And that’s the hope I want to leave you with.
One man showed an enraptured nation the power of standing on morals when everyone was against him.
He didn’t let “reasonable doubt” erase the morality of what happened.
He looked for a good object, a good intention, and good circumstances. Found all three of those were missing. And cast his vote.
What comes next?
For everyone else looking as if Lindsey Clancy could have been them, I’ll get to that in part 2.
Supporting mothers isn’t a black and white situation. There’s a wide spectrum between holding unreasonable expectations to carry everything and a pass to get away with any depravity.
I’ll talk in the next installment about the power pouring into and integrating biology.
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Don’t stop at gaping at the Lindsey Clancy trial in disbelief. Do something better at your home with these related posts:
Liberty Begins At Home 
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