There are already rumblings within feminist organizations that the murders were actually Russell's fault, and that he was a domineering and abusive husband.
Patricia Ireland has instructed us that Yates was, like other victimized American women, "imprisoned at home with their children."
While feminists have been stepping forward to suggest that all stay-at-home mothers live perched on the edge of child murder, no one seems to have noted the culpability of the father in this tragedy. Who would continue to have children with a woman who goes crazier with each birth? Even if he did not suspect his wife of being capable of murder, what conscientious father would leave a suicidal woman alone with his five children? Suppose she had cut her throat in front of them? (She had tried.) If these were anyone's children but his own, wouldn't he be found at least civilly liable for reckless endangerment?
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Russell Yates: Accomplice to Murder I think the Andrea Yates story is a fairly harsh condemnation of an extreme Christian culture in which the woman submits completely to the husband and becomes little more than a baby factory.
Russell Yates is trying to spin this story as a condemnation of her psychiatric care, and while I'm sure their is some culpability there I think the bulk of the blame lays with him and his wife.
So much so that I think he should be charged as some sort of criminal accessory.
If the insanity defense begins to fail, how long before the defense begins to echo these arguments?
