Yates Guilty - The jury

Yates Guilty - The jury didn't buy the insanity defense, and Andrea Yates was convicted yesterday of murdering three of her five children.

Two thoughts come to mind: first, the ongoing infantilization of women has taken two big setbacks in the last two months, with the conviction of Kathleen Soliah, and now this. The feminists must be getting some serious grudges on.

And the husband; I'd love, in a perverse way, to know what's going on in his mind. Of course, to the zealot, it's purely a function of Mr. Yates being a "domineering man" and, of course, a "fundamentalist Christian".

This is not to say, by the way, that Mr. Yates doesn't have serious problems, and that he doesn't bear significant responsibility for the deaths of his children. However, in light of . ">the article I linked to last week on the differing standards of justice for men and women, I'm not surprised that Mr. Yates' sins of omission are being treated as more odious than Mrs. Yates' ghastly sins of commission.

But I think it's more complicated than that.

Was Russell Yates so beaten down by living with an insane woman all these years that his entire mind is geared to nothing but mindless support of the woman in his life, even after she's killed his family? I can see that. Or his he insane, himself? I'd suspect a little of both- at the risk of sounding like Stuart Smalley, that relationship had to have been built on thick slatherings of codependence, built around keeping the wife somehow emotionally afloat, at all costs.

People - especially my feminist friends - castigate Mr. Yates for having baby after baby after baby after her condition was diagnosed. But if the hormones of pregancy were the only islands of respite in their lives together - and they both recognized it - isn't that a normal (if sick) response? The instinct for self preservation is a strong one - those islands of relative sanity must have been very tempting to both of them.