David McElroy

Over the weekend, a woman in California killed her two children in a motel room and then wrecked her car in an attempt to kill herself. She then tried to choke herself, but she was rescued. On the way to a hospital, she told police where to find her dead children. We don’t know much about her other than that she lives in Arizona and was driving a car with Georgia license plates.

Stories such as this are gut-wrenching for most of us, because it’s one of our most basic instincts to protect children and save them from harm. We tend to assume this is just a snap decision by someone who’s mentally ill. But other stories are even more horrific — and long term.

When Jonathan Adleta’s girlfriend, Sarah, got pregnant, he wouldn’t agree to marry her until she agreed that he could engage in “daddy-daughter sex” with the girl after she was born. They married and Adleta abused the child. His wife was expected to engaged in sex with a son when they had one in the future. The pair are on trial now after their crimes were discovered. (That’s their mugshots above.)

Parents fail in horrific ways all the time, some of which are criminal acts, but most of which are legal, but still damaging to children. For those of us who reject the legitimacy of the state, this brings up an uncomfortable and difficult question. If we reject the state, who is to protect children? Who is to step in when monsters such as the Adletas hurt their children? And who is to make decisions when parents are making crazy decisions that damage their kids?

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It’s interesting to hear what conservatives say when they’re talking just among themselves. Same with progressives, libertarians and other groups. Despite the groups’ very different beliefs, there’s a common thread that I tend to observe.

In all of these groups, they might argue among themselves at times, but you can tell they generally come from the same set of assumptions about the world. I tend to listen to a lot of these sorts of discussions. I rarely participate, because I’m getting to the point that it’s not worth arguing. So I just listen and try to figure out what groups believe and how the social groups interact. It’s sort of like being a political sociologist without getting paid for it.

When I listen to the supporters of pretty much any political viewpoint, I can understand the logic of what they believe — if I simply accept their assumptions about the world. No matter how much I disagree with them, I can almost always understand where they’re coming from.

But the vast majority of these people are disdainful of those in other groups. They clearly don’t have any understanding of what the other groups believe or why. What’s more, they’re not really interested in what the other groups believe or why. They’re mostly interested in making fun of them or putting them down in various ways, many times viciously. Within the groups, there seems to be an air of superiority that is amazingly similar. If you removed the ideological content of what they were saying and just looked at the social content of what they were expressing, you’d be hard pressed to figure out which groups were which.

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You might be surprised how much email I get from people looking for advice about how to choose between two romantic choices. It all started last summer after I wrote about the dangers of losing both romantic choices if you refuse to make a choice. I had no idea this was such a common issue.

I wrote that article last year after meeting a young woman named Ashley who was trying to decide between two men who both loved her. With most articles I write, a piece will get a huge readership in the first week if it’s ever going to become well-read, but then it doesn’t get a lot of readership after its first few weeks. A popular article might have thousands of readers in its first week and then almost nobody in the months to come. The article about choosing between two loves was very different.

That article wasn’t one that was passed around and linked by hundreds on Facebook, but it’s attracted a steady stream of people reading it every single day since then. Even after a year, it’s a rare day when that article isn’t read at least 50 times. And people almost always find it through search engines. Just to grab one random search string that brought someone to the page on Wednesday: “how to choose between two women you love.”

I’ve been thinking about this a lot this week because of a particular email I got from a young man last week. We’ll call him Ben, although that’s not his real name. Ben told me — at length — about the two women in his life. One is his current girlfriend and another is a long-time friend who’s been more than just a friend. Ben and the current girlfriend are “taking a break” for him to think about what he wants.

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