The trial of child murderer Lindsay Clancy has produced yet more political fallout. Over this past weekend, some Republican women in media circles expressed concern over online calls to “repeal the 19th Amendment.”
Let me save you some googling here. The 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was passed by Congress in 1919 and ratified in 1920. It was the amendment that gave American women the right to vote.
So why would anyone want to repeal it? There is scarcely anyone left alive who was even born before the 19th Amendment’s passage. No living American woman has ever been lawfully denied the vote because of her sex.
The answer is… because of vocal (though fringe) feminist calls to pardon, exonerate, or otherwise excuse child murderer Lindsay Clancy. Throughout Lindsay Clancy’s recent trial in Plymouth, Massachusetts, pink-clad, overwhelmingly female protesters showed up to demonstrate on Lindsay Clancy’s behalf.
The pro-Clancy demonstrations provoked widespread backlash. At the most extreme end of this backlash are some calls to repeal the 19th Amendment. Such declarations are mostly limited to social media.
According to the logic here, if women will support child murderer Lindsay Clancy, they should not have a voice in our democracy.
Before we go any further, allow me to make a necessary disclaimer. Taking away women’s right to vote is neither justified nor a plausible political outcome. “That dog,” as the old-timers say, “ain’t gonna hunt.” Women’s suffrage is not some newfangled idea of the social media age. My grandmothers both voted, as did all four of my great-grandmothers. This is not 1919. Women are now CEOs, governors, senators, military personnel and police officers.
And then there are the retail political realities—even if the 19th Amendment is never repealed (which it won’t ever be). Want to elect liberal Democrats for the next four or five election cycles? Keep talking about the repeal of the 19th Amendment.
Calls for the repeal of the 19th Amendment are so politically toxic that one almost suspects a false flag operation. But that probably isn’t what’s happening here. This is yet another instance of social media rewarding the most extreme and combustible positions available.
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But two things can be true—or false—at the same time. The wrongheaded, politically suicidal proposal to repeal the 19th amendment must be evaluated on its own terms. So must the affection for the filicidal Lindsay Clancy in certain feminist circles.
And let’s be clear. From the get-go, the grassroots and online advocacy for Lindsay Clancy has been distinct from the more generic histrionic sympathy that we sometimes see displayed for convicted murderers. Since the beginning, the pro-Lindsay Clancy movement has had explicitly feminist overtones—from the slogans of the courthouse demonstrators, to the pink attire they have adopted as their uniform.
Lindsay Clancy supporters are conspicuously white, affluent, and female. This raises contentious stereotypes about the aberrations of “liberal white women” in the suburbs. It also makes us ask: how did feminism go so far off the rails?
At issue is not the crime itself, but the feminist contextualizing of it. Men still commit the vast majority of violent crimes, including crimes against children. There is little room to dispute this, based on the numbers.
I can also cite anecdotal evidence. Not far from me, in New Richmond, Ohio, in 2023, a 32-year-old man named Chad Doerman killed his three young sons with a rifle, before turning the gun on their mother, his wife. Doerman is a male child-killer who tied Lindsay Clancy’s record three years ago.
There is, however, an important distinction to be made, and this is at the heart of the “repeal the 19th Amendment” rhetoric—as misguided as that rhetoric is. Not even the most bitter, outright misogynistic denizens of the so-called “manosphere” made Chad Doerman’s exoneration their cause. The guy killed his kids and shot his wife. (She later recovered.) Lock him away forever. Execute him if legally feasible.
In 2024, Chad Doerman was sentenced to life in prison without parole. Doerman, like Lindsay Clancy, claimed to be delusional at the time of his crimes, telling investigators that he killed his sons “for God.” Also like Lindsay Clancy, Chad Doerman had no conceivable expectation of personal gain. Nor did he even have an exit plan. When he ended his sons’ lives he effectively ended his own life as he knew it—just like Lindsay Clancy did.
And yet… there was not a single “men’s rights” protest in support of Chad Doerman. It would be well-nigh impossible, I would assert, to find a man willing to publicly demonstrate on behalf of another man who murdered his own children—and that includes the most boorish male chauvinists.
I am old enough to remember Susan Smith’s murders of her two young sons in 1994. Smith locked her two boys, aged three years and fourteen months, in the back of her car before rolling it into a lake. She told police investigators that an unknown black man had stolen her car at gunpoint. When police and prosecutors pointed out numerous inconsistencies in her story, she eventually confessed.
Smith, like Clancy—like Chad Doerman—had mental health issues. (What child murderer does not, after all?) Smith was sexually molested by her stepfather when she was fifteen. She attempted suicide not once—but twice—at the ages of thirteen and eighteen. Smith was a troubled individual, by any reasonable standard.
And yet—the broad consensus throughout American society was that Susan Smith had stepped over an uncrossable line. No one seriously argued that she should be pardoned.
In 1994, I was working in an office with a large number of women colleagues. Many of them were young mothers. I remember several of my female colleagues admitting to having cried after hearing what Susan Smith had done.
They were crying not because another woman had gotten herself in trouble. They were crying for Susan Smith’s two murdered sons.
So what has changed over the last 32 years?
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The attachment of a certain branch of feminism to the Lindsay Clancy cause seems to be closely linked with the extremist pro-abortion movement.
Abortion is an issue that has long produced extremists on both sides. Since the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, however, the pro-abortion movement has gone positively Maoist in some sectors.
This may explain that group’s attachment to Lindsay Clancy and their concomitant callousness toward her three young victims. Lindsay Clancy, in the triple homicide of her children, performed the ultimate act of birth control, after all. Here were three very late-term abortions that the meddling pro-lifers could not possibly hope to prevent, with all their preaching and all their law-passing.
None of the above should be taken as an assertion that the vast majority of American women are in league with the radicals who chanted outside the courthouse in Lindsay Clancy’s defense during her trial. I also suspect that most pro-choice Americans were horrified by Lindsay Clancy’s crimes. (I would hope so, anyway.) But the championing of Lindsay Clancy was a black eye both for feminism and for the pro-abortion rights movement.
To put this in MAGA terms, this was Donald Trump declaring, in the wake of the 2017 Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that “there were very fine people on both sides.”
Donald Trump was wrong in 2017. Lindsay Clancy’s apologists are wrong today. One simply doesn’t contextualize the rantings of neo-Nazis. One doesn’t contextualize the murders of three children, either.
-ET