photo #9361922

This cartoon is obviously exaggerated, but the point underneath it is not funny at all.The loudest defenders of Lindsay Clancy have crossed into deeply disturbing territory.Yes, postpartum depression is real. Yes, postpartum psychosis is real. Yes, mental illness can destroy lives, families, judgment, and reality itself. Nobody serious should mock that or pretend mothers never suffer in silence.But there is a moral line here that should not be blurred, erased, or buried under hashtags.Three children are dead.Cora was 5. Dawson was 3. Callan was 8 months old.They were not lost in some abstract tragedy. They were strangled. That matters. Strangulation is not a split second accident. It is intimate. It is violent. It is sustained. And it happened three times.So when I see women angrily defending Clancy as if she is the victim at the center of this story, I find that almost impossible to process.Compassion for mental illness is one thing.Turning a mother who strangled her three children into a symbol of female suffering is something else entirely.At some point, we have to be able to say evil exists, moral responsibility matters, and dead children deserve more sympathy than the person who took their lives.That should not be controversial.But we live in an age where ideology can apparently twist even the murder of children into a grievance narrative. If the right identity box is checked, some people will rationalize almost anything.That is what makes this so concerning.A society that cannot mourn murdered children without first asking whether the killer belongs to a favored political or cultural category is a society in serious moral trouble.Mental illness may explain some things.It does not make three little children disappear from the center of the story.