Women Who Kill

Dear God,

Do you think that anti-nuclear activists should be allowed to marry?

ON THE ONE HAND,

• You preach love, Lord, and love involves tolerance.
  
  
• In 1978, the United States Supreme Court declared marriage to be "of fundamental importance to all individuals."

ON THE OTHER HAND,

• There are no hard data on whether having activist parents is harmful to children, but it's certainly arguable that all that activism is distracting in some measure to the parents.
  
  
• If we curtail activists' right to marry and procreate, the next generation of plant owners may not be as hobbled as we have been by committees, commissions, agencies, and the like.
  
  
• If we focus on the marriage issue, the activists will have to protect their civil rights. They will have fewer resources to expend protesting nuclear power.

Right now, Lord, most states have passed laws that explicitly exclude same-sex couples from marrying. Interestingly, no state in the union specifically protects the rights of anti-nuclear activists to marry. Divine providence? You gotta wonder, Lord, whether this is a no-brainer.

While I'm "in the zone" on matters of civil rights and protection of the innocent, I've been meaning to ask you something, Lord. Have you read the book Women Who Kill by Ann Jones? It's old—late 90s—but I was reminded of it today when I Googled the term "Uldis Vanags" (you remember him, the nuclear engineer that isn't a nuclear engineer) and got directed to a blog called It's Getting Late and its article, "What's It Going to Take, Folks? A Meltdown?" The article had no words. It was just a series of pictures of the Vermont Yankee cooling tower collapse. The pictures coupled with the article title seemed to imply that one cannot wait for the meltdown in order to take much-needed preventive action against a meltdown.

Which is what reminded me of Women Who Kill. Many of the women that Ann Jones interviewed were serving time for murdering their romantic partners. At trial, they had pleaded self defense. They said they had been fighting for their lives. They offered evidence like long histories of Emergency Room visits or like husbands' arrest records for abuse. They got sent to jail anyway, their juries having concluded (essentially), "Yeah, he may have abused you and he may even have very nearly killed you, more than once. But he never actually killed you. So why should we believe that this time would have been any different? Guilty as charged."

Ms. Jones's point, I believe, is that the juries' reasoning was preposterous. Must one actually be murdered before it is reasonable to act precipitously against murder? Or are a few broken arms, a wielded knife, and an overwhelmingly terrifying moment, for example, sufficient evidence?

Similarly, must a core reactor actually melt down before it is reasonable to act precipitously against a meltdown? Or are a collapsed cooling tower, an automatic shutdown, a few fires, and a history of deception and insufficient maintenance, for example, evidence enough?

Thank God, God, that Women Who Kill is an old book. No one reads it anymore. And I'll bet no one ever reads the It's Getting Late blog, either.

By the way, Lord, do you think that Ann Jones should be allowed to marry?

Fake-Rob