Sarah McCarthy (The Devil in Ms. Yates, May) sees the lesson of Andrea Yates as showing "what can happen to those who get drunk on fundamentalist religious beliefs," stating further that "religion by its nature asks that people suspend human reason and adopt faith, putting themselves into a state of unquestioning obedience to an unseen higher power." She concludes by celebrating her own emancipation from "brainwashed Roman Catholic[ism]."
Here we have the old liberal fantasy that liberty and other western values can somehow be preserved as "objective" while jettisoning the "subjective" system of Judeo-Christian values from which they came. It isn't so. One could well substitute any western value (e.g. human dignity, liberty, equal justice, individualism, the rule of law, private property, democracy, free speech ...) for the word 'religion' in the above quote, since they all depend ultimately on faith in God. These values only appear 'self-evident' within the western way of thinking.
That even some well-meaning believers have been misguided, deluded (e.g. by post-partum depression), ignorant or even manipulative is undeniable, merely confirming that the human tendency toward error and evil must be countered by a vibrant marketplace of ideas, ongoing debate and strong limits on coercive power (all western ideas).
McCarthy blames Andrea Yates' actions on religion. This is as unhelpful and confused as blaming them on liberty itself. The problem has never been religion or liberty, but human error and evil. Our western heritage of freedom rests upon our Judeo-Christian tradition (which includes a set of unprovable but essential premises) and any atheistic belief system will eventually lead to tyranny.
Steven P. Sawyer