Photo: Anne Eggebroten

O Texas, Texas

by Anne Eggebroten

Editor's Note: After the verdict of guilty was announced, Anne Eggebroten, author of "A Biblical Feminist Looks at the Andrea Yates Tragedy", wrote her response and shared it with EEWC's members-only e-mail discussion group list. This is what she wrote:

"O Texas, Texas, thou that killest the sinners and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not! Behold, your house is left unto you desolate" (Matthew 24:37-38). 1

Jesus speaks words like these at the end of a fiery speech against the hypocrisy of his day.. Seven times he repeats, "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!" 

Today we have another kind of hypocrisy judging Andrea Yates sane and guilty of first degree murder at the time she drowned her five children in a bathtub. The prosecuting attorneys argued that Yates was sane because she acted methodically, with secrecy, and knowing right from wrong. 

One attorney, Kaylynn Williford, said, "She made the choice knowing it was a sin in the eyes of God and a crime in the eyes of the state." 

The jury accepted this argument, but let's examine these two claims separately. 

Yes, Andrea knew that killing her children was a crime in the state of Texas. She fully expected to be executed for this crime--in fact, she called the police in immediately afterward to set in motion the wheels of Texas justice. She wanted to be executed. 

But she did not see the drownings as a sin in the eyes of God. In fact, she felt she had already committed the greater sins--being a bad mother and producing children who were ruined and would go to hell if allowed to reach adulthood. She quoted Matthew 18:6, that a person should be flung into the sea rather than cause a child to sin. She had twice tried to kill herself for this sin and failed. 

As a last resort, she decided to use the state of Texas. First she would kill her children--an act of mercy in her eyes, sending them to heaven rather than letting them reach the age of accountability and go to hell. By this act, she would force the state of Texas to kill her--a punishment she felt she deserved for being a bad mother, sins committed long before the drownings. 

Yates judged and sentenced herself in the confused years before June 20, 2001. She lived in a horror-filled fundamentalist culture where people like the raving Michael Woroniecki still shout to strangers, "You are going to Hell!" and "Satan owns you." His flyer, "The Witch, the Wimp" states, "At birth a woman inherits the contentious nature of Eve... unless you face this SIN NATURE you will be tormented and blinded by its vexations."2  Yates' increasing psychosis made it difficult for her to sort out reality from the dire spiritual terrors that these people spun in the air. She couldn't toss these ideas in the trash bin as most of us do. 

The laws of the state of Texas meant nothing to her. She and her husband didn't even trust the state or city enough to send their children to public school. She decided to do what was "right" for her children--and then to use the state justice system to carry out her own judgment on herself. 

Having convinced herself that this plan was right in the eyes of God, she carried it out methodically, with secrecy, and with full knowledge that Texas would punish her. 

But here is exactly where the prosecution got it wrong: she and her husband lived in a culture where only the values decreed by true believers mattered. They were determined to follow God's way and reject the ways of the world, as Paul advises in his letter to the Romans: "And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God" (Romans 12:2). There are many such passages. In his second letter to the Corinthians, Paul writes, "...the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not" (II Corinthians 4:4). 

Rejecting all secular values, living in a nightmare world, Andrea Yates carried out her plan like an executioner. Her own feelings for her children and their struggles against her did not matter, she was so convinced of the rightness of her decision. 

On June 20, 2001, she was obsessed with her sin of having raised these children wrong. This sense of sin overwhelmed her to the point that killing the children seemed right. Now she probably realizes that drowning her children was "a sin in the eyes of God." But Williford was wrong in claiming that Yates knew this as she carried out her plan. The jury was wrong in deciding that she was sane and therefore guilty of a deliberate, willful act. 

So the final act will be left to Jesus, who stopped the stoning of the woman caught in adultery. "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her," Jesus said. There is no one without sin in the Yates story--neither the husband, the doctors, the traveling preacher, the seminary that gave him an M.Div., nor the conservative Christian culture that so dominated the life of this family, telling them that contraception was a sin and that a wife's unquestioning obedience to her husband was a virtue. 

But stones are being cast, the same kind of stoning that drove Jesus to cry out "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem...." 

Editor Note: For more commentary on the trial and its outcome, read:

Endnotes:

1 Quotations from the Bible are from the King James Version, as read by the Yates family and others in this culture.

2 As quoted in Suzy Spencer, Breaking Point (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2001), pp. 178, 202, 214.

Commentaries

Photo: Anne Eggebroten

Anne Eggebroten serves as a Southwest representative on the EEWC Executive Council and is working on a book about the conflicting demands of being a wife, mother, teacher, and feminist.