I had intended to be the one writer in America who was not going to huff and puff about Lindsay Clancy’s strangulation murder of her three children, but the sheer hideousness of her killing her own two sons and daughter speaks to my subject: our peculiar fascination with—and sometimes ridiculous forgiveness of—the unhinged committing the unforgivable.

We love crime stories, and we’ve always had a morbid attraction to the worst among us. Look at our popular entertainment from Cody Jarrett to Don Corleone to Darth Vader; the baddest are the bright, shiny objects that attract our gaze, and many people, strangely enough, are absolutely fascinated with those who kill without compunction. Movies, television—and now the Internet—provide the seductive drug that feeds the fixes of those among us who thrill to playing amateur psychologist between sips of their morning coffee. GoFundMe pages raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for the cruel and unrepentant felons are, of course, a recent phenomenon, but this is simply the most recent manifestation of the weird (and perhaps strangely psychosexual) love that the damaged and demented will occasionally feel toward those who prey upon the weak and innocent.

It is probably a human instinct to try to understand what falls completely outside our own experiences with sanity and accountability, but our efforts in this regard can be a trap because we insist on applying rational standards to what is utterly irrational, which leads us to wrongly presume there is a perfectly justifiable reason for that which is inherently unjustifiable. As a result, basic compassion can lead us believe that an excuse can be found to explain why, in the case of Lindsay Clancy, a mother would methodically murder her three children in a chillingly planned manner after sending their father out on an errand to keep him out of the way.

We imagine that, understanding why it happened, we can prevent such tragedies in the future. However, believing we can understand the logic of those whose brains are a rat’s nest of anger, vindictiveness, envy, delusion, obsession, self-pity, and plain stupidity is the fatal weakness of those who possess adult coping skills and morals.

Sadly, much as we might prefer to believe otherwise, every day of every week from now until the end of time, the unlucky and unwary will be bludgeoned, stabbed, assaulted, and killed. Moreover, the victims might be tortured beforehand, or their bodies defiled after the fact. Mundane murders and heartless cruelties are the dark side of humanity that we blindly prefer to regard as a glitch or anomaly; consequently, we simply cannot reconcile ourselves to the grim reality that the perpetrators are typically sleeping soundly at night with nary a care in the world—beyond avoiding arrest for their crimes.

The human mind, understandably, rejects the idea that some among us are so lacking in compassion or impulse control that they would flay us alive with the same lack of concern with which they take the skin off the chicken they are cooking for dinner that night, but this the reality of the world in which we live—and one we must recognize to ensure our safety and the safety of others.

Although her most fervent supporters seem, thankfully, to be a loud minority of our nation’s population, the plain fact that all that stood between Lindsay Clancy and a not guilty by reason of insanity verdict was one obstinate juror is simply remarkable. That the other 11 people empaneled to judge her decided Clancy’s depression, whether postpartum or not, excused a heartless triple child murder is beyond astonishing. To have also witnessed seemingly rational women lining the road and cheering when she was being transported between jail and court boggles the mind as well.

Try to imagine the same reaction if a man had committed the same crime—or claimed his fluctuating hormonal testosterone problem was to blame—and the grim reality of the feminist cheerleading becomes even grimmer. One has to wonder whether a half century of convincing women that abortion is not murder, even when the clock has run right up to the point of live birth, has chillingly mutated into child murder is no longer murder because those ethical and moral boundaries, once erased, become more and more difficult to discern—and the slippery slope of moral relativism becomes a rock slide. Apparently, we have entered a very dark and frightening period in our nation’s social and cultural history, one when what was at one time unthinkable seems just fine and dandy to a vocal and thoroughly committed subset of lunatics—which we can only hope will not grow larger in the years to come.

For perhaps the first time in human history, America is facing a unique conundrum that can make or break a nation: Is it possible for a people to be too good, too compassionate, and too giving? Can we continue to expend our national wealth and blood defending countries who are allies in name only? Can we continue to coddle the laziest, who find the idea of working to support themselves repugnant? Can we continue to spend our time and treasure helping those who have no interest in being helped?

Should we succumb and continue to overlook the evil that seems to be bubbling up around us because we are afraid of being labeled as intolerant or bigoted?

A statement by a Lindsay Clancy juror after the mistrial, expressing her frustration with the lone juror who refused to acquit by reason of insanity, neatly summarizes the madness all around us today: “He had the hardest time getting off the fact that Lindsay viciously killed her children.” If the morally deficient can now demand that we ignore heinous crimes, we are all in a world of trouble, for our laws are a reflection of our values, and how we choose to enforce them—or not—is the truest measure of the health of our nation.