As I think about the Lindsay Clancy trial, which is nearing its end, two images stay with me.
The first is Lindsay Clancy strangling her three children one by one, even chasing one around to finish the job.
The other, almost as gruesome, is Clancy following the killings, jumping from a second-story window in her home in Duxbury, Massachusetts.
Now, who jumps out of windows? Well, people who are facing an even worse fate.
A second group that jumps out of windows is people who are demonically possessed.
Remember the scene in The Exorcist where Father Karras hurls himself out of the bedroom window and plummets to his death? I knew the author of The Exorcist, William Peter Blatty.
He wrote a blurb from one of my books, Hillary's America, and he called it, "One of the most terrifying things he had ever encountered." He also told me the film he wrote and produced, The Exorcist, was based on a true case.
In the film, it was Karras who jumped, but the demon who possessed him and made him do it.
And lest we dismiss the relevance of a demon in the Lindsay Clancy case, notice her insistence that she heard a male voice telling her to kill her children.
Now, there's a powerful maternal instinct that prevents mothers from killing their children.
The monstrosity of abortion is not merely that a woman kills a child, but rather that a mother kills her own child.
I do not believe that Lindsay Clancy, who we know from lots of testimony was a good mother, would under normal circumstances kill her three children.
Something or someone drove her to do it, and then to attempt to kill herself in the aftermath.
Soon after that, in the hospital, Lindsay Clancy recovered her faculties and returned seemingly to being a human being, a normal person.
In the moments, actually minutes, when she was killing her children, she was something other than human.
If she was not acting on demonic instruction, she nevertheless did something inhuman, unspeakable, demonic.
Andrea Yates, who drowned her children in the early 2000s, also reported demonic influences on her action.
Now, significantly, Andrea Yates reported the satanic voice telling her that her children were evil and heading for hell, and only by killing them while they were still young could she save their souls.
As I think about the Lindsay Clancy trial, which is nearing its end, two images stay with me.
The first is Lindsay Clancy strangling her three children one by one, even chasing one around to finish the job.
The other, almost as gruesome, is Clancy following the killings, jumping from a second-story window in her home in Duxbury, Massachusetts.
Now, who jumps out of windows? Well, people who are facing an even worse fate.
A second group that jumps out of windows is people who are demonically possessed.
Remember the scene in The Exorcist where Father Karras hurls himself out of the bedroom window and plummets to his death? I knew the author of The Exorcist, William Peter Blatty.
He wrote a blurb from one of my books, Hillary's America, and he called it, "One of the most terrifying things he had ever encountered." He also told me the film he wrote and produced, The Exorcist, was based on a true case.
In the film, it was Karras who jumped, but the demon who possessed him and made him do it.
And lest we dismiss the relevance of a demon in the Lindsay Clancy case, notice her insistence that she heard a male voice telling her to kill her children.
Now, there's a powerful maternal instinct that prevents mothers from killing their children.
The monstrosity of abortion is not merely that a woman kills a child, but rather that a mother kills her own child.
I do not believe that Lindsay Clancy, who we know from lots of testimony was a good mother, would under normal circumstances kill her three children.
Something or someone drove her to do it, and then to attempt to kill herself in the aftermath.
Soon after that, in the hospital, Lindsay Clancy recovered her faculties and returned seemingly to being a human being, a normal person.
In the moments, actually minutes, when she was killing her children, she was something other than human.
If she was not acting on demonic instruction, she nevertheless did something inhuman, unspeakable, demonic.
Andrea Yates, who drowned her children in the early 2000s, also reported demonic influences on her action.
Now, significantly, Andrea Yates reported the satanic voice telling her that her children were evil and heading for hell, and only by killing them while they were still young could she save their souls.
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