MASSACHUSETTS MADNESS

How the mighty have fallen.  Massachusetts, once the home of John Adams, the “Atlas of American independence” and future President of the United States, is now led by Maura Healey, the state’s first lesbian governor and the chief executive who recently signed a bill protecting a woman’s right to abort her baby up to the point of birth.  At the signing ceremony a gaggle of females standing behind her desk applauded enthusiastically.  Meanwhile in Plymouth, Massachusetts, a crowd of ladies in pink voiced their enthusiastic support for Lindsay Clancy, who was on trial for strangling the life out of her three children -- Cora, Dawson, and Callan.   

Thirty years earlier the distinguished Democrat New York Senator and former Harvard Professor Patrick Moynihan, who was not a pro-life warrior, compared partial birth abortion to infanticide.  One can only imagine Abigail Adams cringing at the thought of her “remember the ladies” request to John being invoked by twenty-first century feminists to cheer unrestricted abortion as health care and to invoke inadequate medical treatment plus postpartum psychosis as a legal excuse for a mom carefully planning and carrying out the extermination of her three children over the span of eighteen minutes.

It at least makes sense that the same state that elected a governor who supports unrestricted abortion also devised an insanity defense putting the burden of proof on the prosecution rather than the defense.  In addition, Bay State prosecutors must prove not only that defendants know the difference between right and wrong but also that they can control their actions.  This virtually insuperable standard unique to Massachusetts resembles the obligation to prove a negative, to prove it twice, and to prove it “beyond a reasonable doubt.”  She’s “not” cognitively unaware of standards of right and wrong, and she’s “not” unable to control her actions.  Throw in the fact that the criminal act concerns killing three kids, and the prosecution’s task becomes akin to climbing Mt. Everest.

Governor Healey also recently signed the mendaciously labeled “Protect Act,” a law that further limits the sanctuary state’s cooperation with ICE and guarantees that illegal aliens are protected, as much as reasonably possible, from deportation.  Even before Healey’s new law the police department of Boston’s super-Woke Mayor Michelle Wu, the daughter of Taiwanese immigrants, ignored ICE detainers on scores of illegals, among them aliens accused of arson, child abuse, assault, and drug dealing. 

Then there’s Ed Markey, the state’s octogenarian senator who proclaimed his support for a transgender bill of rights after easily defeating his forty-seven-year-old primary opponent with similar leftist credentials.  This eccentric topic became a campaign issue for Democrats thanks to Congressman Moulton’s ill-advised statement in 2024, "I have two little girls. I don't want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete.”  He added that “as a Democrat I'm supposed to be afraid to say that.”  Even after offering a groveling apology of sorts, the former marine would discover that fear was, indeed, warranted for his perfectly sensible statement in madly blue Massachusetts, a locale where “gender-affirming care” for minors is already a state constitutional right that extends to youngsters from other states who seek to cure their anxieties by mutilating their bodies.

One should remember that Massachusetts is also the state that continued to reelect Ted Kennedy to the Senate seven times even after the senator abandoned a car he had driven off a bridge at Chappaquiddick Island, a car that still contained a woman who was not his then-pregnant wife.  Mary Jo Kopechne likely died of suffocation while Kennedy returned to the party cottage from which the two had left late that night.  The police were contacted approximately ten hours later, giving Kennedy time, if needed, to sober up, though he was never given an alcohol test.  The judicial slap on the wrist that followed for abandoning the scene of the accident didn’t deter the state’s highly educated residents from sending Ted back to the Senate a year later in 1970 with 62% of the vote.  A blow by blow recounting of the incident can be found in this 2018 Politico review of the film “Chappaquiddick.” 

Massachusetts lawmakers are currently considering a bill that would give Muslims a greater voice in state government and address areas of discrimination presumably perpetrated against that community.  The bill would create an eleven-member commission to work with state officials on areas of concern to Muslims such as education, civil rights, health care, employment, and, of course, Islamophobia.   When those familiar topics inevitably morph into madrasa lessons, community cutouts for sharia law, and employment standards  that reflect Muslim mores vis-à-vis pork, dogs, female attire, and the like, one wonders if even inveterate Bay State virtue signalers might find such concessions to “an oppressed minority” a “bridge too far.”

Recently a woman in Illinois who closely followed the Clancy trial has allegedly killed her two-year-old child by ligature compression of the neck in her basement, the same method and location of Clancy’s acknowledged victims.  Following the homicide the accused killer also inflicted on herself some perfunctory suicide cuts.  Fortunately, Illinois doesn’t require the state to prove what should be the defense’s burden, though the defense only needs “clear and convincing” evidence, not evidence “beyond a reasonable doubt” that a perpetrator doesn’t know right from wrong.  While Massachusetts boasts that almost half its adults have college degrees and likely takes pride in the fact that it’s the most secular state in the union, perhaps a less ideologically enthralled and more religiously grounded jury pool in the Midwest might find it possible to believe a mother can actually be held legally culpable for strangling her child to death.

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California.  His book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle , as is his book Poetry with a Moral Edge.