Andrea Yates. Deanna Laney. Deanna Strausser, and most recently, La Shaun Harris, all share a same commonality: Mothers who murdered their children believing that it was the will of God, or somehow influenced by Satan himself. All of these women share another similarity as well - a rigid, fundamentalist viewpoint of God which underscores sin, hell and eternal damnation rather than anything approximating redemption or grace, and with an emphasis on the inherent, evil nature of women.

In the case of Dena Schlosser, the Texas mother that killed her 10 month old child by severing its arms, she repeatedly told her husband of a desire "to give her children to God" prior to the killings. The Scholssers attended a fundamentalist Water of Life church which teaches that all women have a 'Jezebel Spirit'. From Dr. Michael Thomas, PhD:

"It (the Jezebel Spirit) is a spirit that seeks to control men and women, but primarily women, and to manipulate others through them, often through sexual means.

Dr. Thomas further notes:"This has noting to do with women preaching in the church, we attribute this spirit to a women who by the same name caused the fall of mighty men of God."

The overt misogyny of that sort of statement is never once questioned in such sects, but accepted and preached as a touchstone of the faith itself, where a hostile God waits eagerly in judgement for even the faintest opportunity to throw his children straight into hell. And if one is taught that the Deity they love and adore would do such things, where is it expected and encouraged that they would spare their own children any less?

The apple not falling so very far from the tree, so to speak.

Deanna Laney, who stoned her children to death, believed that God had given her signs that told her the world was coming to an end and to get ready. WHen her son Joshua did not immediately die, she continued bashing his head until "a streak of lightning blazed across the sky."

She reported it was then that she knew he was dead.

Russell and Andrea Yates were influenced by Michael Woroniecki, a self-ordained evangelist who convinced followers them that they were "at risk of losing God's love, teaching that women were created to serve man and failure to teach a daughter submission was effectively grooming her in witchcraft." Days before Andrea Yates drowned her children, she reported auditory hallucinations of Satan speaking to her.

As with every belief system, there are always those adherents driven by extremism where actions which would normally seem abhorrent to the average person seem viable within the context. What lurks in the underbelly of such establishmentarianism is a fundamental principle that emphasizes fear rather than salvation and guilt as a virtue, with women as the prima facie for the fall of all men. What is most frightening that this is not the exception in the realm of fundamentalism, but the rule.

LaShaun Harris, who was found not guilty by reason of insanity January 17th, told the investigators God "said I need to kill my kids," and she took them to the pier for that purpose. When police officer Thomas Johnson testified that he found Harris at the scene pushing an empty stroller and asked ""Where did you put the babies?" Harris replied,

"They're OK. They're with their father now,"



* In Midrashic literature, Adam's first wife was not Eve, but rather Lilith who ultimately rebelled and was inevitably replaced by Eve. General Midrashic scholars believe that the sin of Lilith was one of desiring equality and that she refused to lie beneath Adam as subservience. After refusing, she spoke the ineffable name of God and vanished.

Adam, desiring her back, spoke to God. After a visitation of three angels in which she was warned that one hundred of her children would die daily were she not to return, she insisted that she was created expressly to murder children, and her fate was set. Eve was created to invoke yet another fall, and the rest is history.

Sources:

http://www.karisable.com/andreayates.htm
http://www.ephraimproject.com/teachings/jezebel.htm