Scapegoating women over the Lindsay Clancy trial won't solve anything

The criminal trial of Lindsay Clancy, who killed her three children in 2023, has exposed some dark phenomena, further irritating an already raw and gaping battle-of-the-sexes wound in the American psyche and culture. 

After the case was declared a mistrial on Sept. 4, when a lone juror refused to budge and agree that she was not guilty by reason of insanity, it is now yielding widespread scapegoating of women as a whole. This is a foolish, oversimplified misfire leading nowhere good, even as emerging realities on the ground and in cyberspace are indeed disturbing. 

First, it cuts against the psychological grain for many people to admit, but it is true, alas, that women are capable of both sympathizing with and doing acts of grave evil. And like many, I found myself viscerally horrified seeing the outpouring of performative theatrics and hordes of delusional conspiracy theories emanating from women on social media related to the Clancy trial.

Second, seeing some women, who exuded smarminess, use their own children as props with #samelindsay hashtags in TikTok videos, or others who asserted without evidence that Clancy’s husband, Patrick, was the real killer based on his zodiac sign, sent many men over the edge. Something truly ominous and terrible has boiled over here. 

But for some reason, while processing all I was seeing, I randomly recalled a harrowing anecdote — entirely unrelated to the Clancy case — that I’ve never forgotten and has haunted me for years and still does. I heard it from a victim's advocate, someone I completely trust, and it got me thinking about the 21st-Century battle-of-the-sexes relational wasteland we now inhabit that the Clancy case made painfully clear.

A Christian woman whose husband was watching extremely violent pornography demanded she reenact the degradation in the bedroom. This violated her conscience, and she refused. Her husband then displayed a gun, implying a threat. When she finally mustered the courage to ask her church leaders for help, they actually suggested she dress sexier for him so he would not need to use porn. It’s not the only gut-wrenching story of this sort that such advocates regularly field. Not all are as extreme, but situations like these often remain hidden and covered up for years. 

Because they remain hidden, often under layers of crushing shame, it's hard to obtain solid data and a clear picture of how widespread the problem is. Unless they can find a way to escape, the women suffer in quiet, excruciating agony, and in some cases, the very people who should help them only increase their torment — with what feels like God Almighty's approval.

I'll return to that story in a moment.

But to say that men and women in our society are ideologically divided is the understatement of the century, and those divisions cut across many issues. And the Clancy trial fallout was, for many, a cross-the-Rubicon moment.

Indeed, the case has become a relational Rorschach test during a time when the institutional and political Left continues to pretend that it doesn't know what a woman is in service to transgender ideology, defends pornography, and their ideological allies in the “human rights” arena disgustingly reframe the grotesque exploitation that is prostitution as “sex work.” And yes, many liberal women also champion these foul views. Conversely, a loud and growing swath of men on the acrimonious Right (and a few women, too) argue that feminism is the singular brainworm that ruined everything in the West — complete with #RepealThe19th hashtags. 

Such right-wingers highlight the antics of what they call AWFLs (affluent white female liberals) who take their children to drag shows, “trans” their boys into girls, and display all manner of woke wine mom and officious HR lady unhingedness. Their antics are awful, to be sure. Many of them also recently pointed to not only the female TikTokers arguing that Patrick Clancy killed the three children, but the jarring bleakness of watching a group of women dressed in pink, and in the same state where the trial occurred, smile and clap after Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey had signed legislation removing gestational limits on abortion. The bill legalized the procedure up until the moment of birth and made Massachusetts the 10th state to enact such a law.

Yet what does any of that have to do with the Christian woman whose church elders suggested she dress sexier for her torture porn-watching husband and coercing her into it, you ask?

It's because it’s important to remember that we didn't arrive at this extreme social bleakness and relational rupture overnight, nor will we escape it overnight. And that’s not an oblique defense of Clancy's actions or the evil some women carry out and promote, including — especially — those who applauded legalizing third-trimester abortion. Moreover, I've become acquainted with several men in recent years whose soon-to-be ex-wives have unleashed otherworldly torment on them while trans-ing their children, often wielding weaponized state agencies and warped laws against them. One such father I know, who went into tens of thousands of dollars of debt to prevent his pre-teen daughter from being put on puberty blockers, has described this particular agony as having “an eternal hole smashed into your heart.” He is not overstating the suffering. It is a grinding torture from the sulfurous bowels of hell, and his ex-wife is a heinous person.  

But it occurs to me that the scapegoating rage and remedies now swirling online appear to rest on the same kind of structures that once entrapped (and still entrap) abused women — the very structures out of which understandable resentment and certain feminist attitudes and ideas arose in the first place. I think of the church leadership that is either knowingly enabling the sexual degradation of women, or they are frustratingly blind to its existence. Manosphere-style scapegoating of women as a whole will not solve a single thing —  it only gives teeth to the stereotype that conservative religious men want women to be small and servile. It’s recreating the very conditions, the very pressure cooker, fueling this widespread relational chaos that has exploded like a volcano. Earnest, wholesome women, many of whom are just as troubled by the female TikTokers in the Clancy case and who want no part of the moral insanity swallowing our society, will be swept up into this and be wounded. In fact, some of them already are. And it seems that some men are more than fine with them being collateral damage. (I'm not.)

And for what? And then what? 

Irony of ironies, those now scapegoating women as a whole are doing exactly what many feminists have done for decades in blaming nearly all the world's ills on “the patriarchy” and endlessly calling masculinity “toxic.” Sure, there is an unmistakable sexual asymmetry operating here in light of who has controlled key institutions for most of history, especially churches, but if good men hate it when women demonize them wholesale, which they're absolutely right to dislike (I know I do), why would we think women appreciate the same? 

Scapegoating entire groups of people is foolish because it wallows in assigning blame — the broader and more identifiable the target, the better. It’s politically potent precisely because it's psychologically easy. When a problem is misdiagnosed, it will only morph into something uglier and more vicious. And that's what's happening. 

None of this means we stop addressing real evil when we see it — the Christian woman living in fear with a “Christian” husband hooked on violent smut deserved better from her elders, not a lingerie lecture. The dads fighting to protect their children from the transgender medical industry and its irreversible harms deserve to have their rightful fury about what self-consumed Munchausen by proxy moms are doing be taken seriously, not dismissed. 

But there's a difference between naming the specific people and systems that fail the vulnerable and indicting an entire sex for the sins of a subset of it. The first is justice. The second is the pressure cooker that burns and wounds many who aren’t culpable. 

If the Church wants to address this hideous rot — in marriages, in families, in the wider culture — it will have to do the harder thing: hold individuals accountable without collapsing into tribal blame and protect the vulnerable.

Anything less isn't a solution — it's just the same old scapegoating while wearing a cross.