So, Why Is Penn Doing This?
Over the weekend, my wife and I watched a TV special on the Hart family murders , in which a lesbian couple drove an SUV with themselves and six adopted children off a northern California coastal cliff to their deaths in 2018. As more information emerged, it became clear that the couple, who had adopted the children in two groups of siblings in Texas, had received funding -- as much as 50% of their family income -- from the State of Texas for doing this, but had systematically starved, abused, and neglected the children over a period of years but had managed to evade successive complaints about the abuse to child welfare authorities in multiple states. My wife immediately remarked that there was something eerily reminiscent of the Penn trans swimmer story here. Somehow a group of the less powerful, though part of a "family" were being callously sacrificed to a larger narrative that the more powerful wished to enforce at whatever cost. In fact, the women seem to have mo...