True North

I’ve spent a bit of time in the past few weeks catching up on reading my leftyblogs.

And owwwie - my trip through the fever swamp has left me covered with bug bites and woodticks. There are some nutbars out there - and I’m not talking the fringey soloblogs, even; the Minnesota Monitor seems to have made a concerted effort to transform from an incompetent news organization to a laughable “Gawker”-style rantblog; while even Nick Coleman in his “prime” didn’t provide this much material, it eventually feels like playing football against six-year-olds; it’s easy to run up a score, but too easy to be really satisfying.

So it’s usually fun to read Charlie Quimby over at “Across the Great Divide”; he’s a lefty but he’s not dumb.

And so I flipped over there, and saw the latest headline: “Why Do Religious Conservatives Kill Their Kids?”

Ow. Talk about whiplash.

Here’s a topic for study by some enterprising PhD student: Do more religious conservatives than liberals murder their children?

That’s have to be one mighty enterprising PhD student. While a parent’s religion might certainly be an element into an investigation into a murder, I don’t recall that a parent’s voting record has, for anyone this side of Kathleen Soliah.

Seriously; have you ever seen a story that kicked off:

A Framingham mother of three, active in her Massachusetts Democratic Party caucus, strangled her toddler yesterday.

Mary Noel Bilkosky-Mullins-Stoppard, 42, of Framingham, was booked on charges of murder yesterday.

Neighbors describe her as “a committed liberal.” “While most of us believe in a woman’s right to choose - I mean, duh - Mary Noel was very committed to the cause - almost like a fundamentalist”, said Bilkosky-Mullins-Stoppard’s neighbor, Ian Micah Schlumberg-Rossellini, interviewed at the local organic food market for this story.

You’ve never seen it, have you?

And you never will!

Hold that thought. We’ll come back to it.

(You can spare me the comments about abortion.

Well, actually, that enforces a certain myopia on the debate, doesn’t it? If one wants to discuss attitudes toward crime, life and death, and murder based on politics, why leave out the biggest single issue signalling group attitudes toward the value of life; that among most fundie Christians, a life has to do something very wrong to deserve being erased, while among the left, it’s (very generally) the opposite.

But OK. I’ll try to stay on Charlie’s topic here.

In Wisconsin this week, the home schooled daughter of a fundamentalist family diedbecause her diabetes was left untreated. The mother says they are not crazy, religious people who belong to any organized faith. She just writes for an end-of-days ministry website on the side and actively proselytizes other women. Her sister-in-law, who called the sheriff, seemed to think there was a problem.

Whoah, Charlie! The whiplash is killing me!

OK. You found a piece that hit a bunch of the hot buttons that lefties find weird; fundamental Christianity, home schooling, healing by faith. Let’s limit our focus, shall we - Homeschooling is rarely lethal (indeed, it works better than school education in nearly every possible instance), and faith-healing is a very fraught issue to which I’m rather close, via this couple, both of whom were professors of mine in college. It’s a different, and much more complex, issue than Charlie’s focus.

Quimby started talking about Andrea Yates, who actively murdered her children - hardly the same thing.

In Iowa, an embezzling banker bludgeoned his wife and four kids to death before killing himself. In communications left behind, he indicated he believed his family was in heaven.

I’m not sure what Charlie’s trying to get at, here. Was he insane for clubbing his family to death? Or for claiming they’re in heaven? Or is the latter just snarky “evidence” of insanity, in case the whole “bludgeoning” thing didn’t convince you? Indeed, does belief in heaven make you either fundamentalist or insane?

Well, send a truck for me, Charlie. I believe they’re in heaven, too. Most of the people in this country’d probably agree.

But Charlie’s digression caused me to digress as well. It’s no excuse, but…

And, not to leave anyone out, a Muslim cab driver in Canada strangled his 16-year-old daughter because she refused to submit to his control and demands she wear traditional Muslim garb.

I’ve looked for a study that examines the role of political and religious beliefs of parents who murder their children. Haven’t found one. But golly, the circumstantial evidence doesn’t look good, does it? And it stands to reason, when you decide to kill your kids with a baseball bat, the idea you’re sending them to heaven might lets you swing just a little more freely.

Anyone offended yet?

No, just confused. Since most people of mainstream faith hold the concurrent belief that the same act that’d send your kids to heaven wil send you to a place under complete DFL control hell, Charlie’s implied conclusion (”fundamentalism helps predispose people to murderous lunacy” might not be word-perfect, but it’s close enough, given Charlie’s post’s title) makes less sense than saying, perhaps, than concluding “someone whose personality is defective enough to kill their children is newsworthy; if that same person is a fundamentalist, it’s newsworthy and indulges the urge to bash fundamentalists and/or people of faith in general”.

Oh, not to worry; Charlie is only yanking our chains. Right?

Psychiatric researchers may not see much merit in testing my only half-serious hypothesis. The research already indicates that filicide is a multidimensional crime, and like most human behavior, is not likely to reduce down to red state/blue state simplification.

But it’s hard to shake that whenever I see news of a suicide bomber or a murderous parent, God shows up pretty frequently in the story. John Kerry bumper stickers, not so much.

Well, most of the Islamofascist suicide bombers were hoping Kerry would win.
Hey, if Charlie gets to half-seriously yank chains, why not I?
But OK. Since Charlie can “half-seriously” connect correlation and causation based on an infinitesimally-tiny sampling of crimes, linked with either mental illness (the Yates and Iowa murders) or a sect of Islam that actively promotes murder, or a combination of the two (the cabbie and his daughter), why not join into the fun.

What’s the murder capitol of Minnesota? North Minneapolis and the Phillips Neighborhood on the south side.

Who did they vote for in ‘04?

Well, I saw a lot more “Kerry” stickers over there.

Or to paraphrase Charlie, it’s hard to shake that whenever I see news of a neighorhood ruined by drug trafficking, where honest citizens are afraid to go out at night, Democrat bumper stickers show up pretty regularly; “WWJD” and NRA stickers and Milton Friedman T-shirts and, well, visible manifestations of religious faith, not so much.

Another question; is fundamentalism equally likely to cause society to devalue the life of the fundamentalist?

But here’s a hunch, and perhaps some work for Charlie’s PhD student, when he/she gets tired of trying to calculate minuscule numbers; very anecdotally (as in, “as I’ve noticed in grazing stories on the subject”, which is pretty much the same source Charlie used for his bit), Munchhausen’s By Proxy seems to be correlated with women whose surface-y indicators point toward “left of center” orientation; a self-centered view of the world, inability to accept good news, and so on.

Hey, it’s no farther-fetched than Charlie’s theory…

Cross-posted and comments welcome at Shot In The Dark.