Tag: Duggars

The “Learning” Channel has taken the plunge at last and terminated the Duggar show. The Duggar family (or their PR staff) have issued a “statement” (as if they were public officials). Let’s read their “statement.”

Today, TLC announced that they will not be filming new episodes of 19 Kids and Counting.

Years ago, when we were asked to film our first one hour documentary about the logistics of raising 14 children, we felt that it was an opportunity to share with the world that children are a blessing and a gift from God.

No, not “share with the world that.” They mean “try to convince the world that.”

Children are a good thing (a “blessing”) if you want them. It’s not up to anyone else to decide for you that they are a good thing for you. It’s certainly not up to a pair of religious fanatics in Arkansas to decide that, or to try to convince you to have them.

Children are not a “gift from God.” They’re the product of the fertilization of an egg by sperm. The Duggars don’t know anything about “God”; they only think they do. They think this fictional knowledge that they think they have entitles them to tell everyone else what to do, especially when it comes to sex and marriage and childbearing.

Over the last several years people have said to us, “We love your show!” We have always responded, “It’s not a show, it’s our lives!” Our desire in opening our home to the world is to share Bible principles that are the answers for life’s problems.

No, they are not. Many “Bible principles” are horrific, and the bible is not the only or best (let alone most reliable) source for any principles whatever, good or bad. The bible is just a book, a compilation of stories and poetry and polemic; it’s just one book of many.

It is our prayer that the painful situation our family went through many years ago can point people toward faith in God and help others who also have lived through similar dark situations to find help, hope and healing, as well.

Why would it do that? Why wouldn’t it rather clue people in that the Duggars are just as self-justifying and callous as anyone else, and more so than some?

God’s faithfulness and goodness to us, along with His abundant grace have given us strength and joy even in the most difficult days.

We have committed to Him that in all things—difficulties or success, good times or bad—we will purpose to bring Him honor by staying true to our faith and our family.

Cool justification loop there – if good things happen it’s god’s grace and if bad things happen it’s god’s grace. Nothing can happen that isn’t god’s grace, so god is always graceful, and there is no way out of the loop.

We know Who holds the future and are confident that He will work all things together for good.

Of course you are, because you’ve just said it’s all good and from god, no matter what it is. More high scores for god, who can do no ill.

We love each of you and look forward to unfolding the future with peace and joy.

They love each of us – even me! – despite not knowing us. How godlike, and even ineffable.

Poor Duggars. They’re still in the weeds, trying to figure out why god won’t pluck them to safety.

According to In Touch, which first broke the molestation story involving the former “19 Kids and Counting” star, one of 27-year-old Josh Duggar’s victims who isn’t in his immediate family will be filing a civil lawsuit against him.

The anonymous source who told In Touch about the lawsuit added that it could be very damaging not just for Josh, but the entire family, because as a civil proceeding about a crime whose statute of limitations has expired, neither he nor his parents would be allowed to plead the Fifth to avoid self-incrimination.

Aww…so they have to spill or be in contempt?

Being forced to answer uncomfortable questions about when they knew about Josh’s behavior — and after they learned about it, what measures they took to protect his siblings and their friends from him — could put the future of “19 Kids and Counting” in even greater jeopardy than it already is.

Or, who knows, it could just prompt even more on-air crying and complaints of martyrdom to the Libbrul Agenda.

Legal experts told In Touch that the victim will be eligible to sue Josh Duggar under Arkansas Code Annotated Section 16-56-130, which stipulates that victims of a sexual assault can bring civil litigation against their attackers whenever they begin to feel the effects of the abuse — even if that occurs years later.

I wonder if there are similar stipulations in states where Bill Cosby pursued his hobby.

 

Holy crap. Libby Anne did some Google-sleuthing after the Duggar parents’ interview, and she found something pretty…telling.

While Josh initially molested his sisters while they slept, he eventually began molesting them while they were awake, too. Did the family value personal space so little that the girls seriously had no idea this this was inappropriate?

“We pulled him out [of the home], and he went through working with that man.”

What man, pray?

“This man really reached his heart.”

“This man” is convenient shorthand for “I don’t want to tell you who.”

But there were clues.

He was running a little training center in Little Rock Arkansas. And under the roof of that training center, you had Little Rock police department on one side, and you had a prison ministry on the other. And he said Josh would come down there and actually do some construction work with him and he would counsel him and work with him and hopefully get him straightened out.

Did this training center have a name? Presumably it would have, but Jim Bob seems very interested in not mentioning it. Hmm. This is a good bit of information, though—the stuff about the police department, and a prison ministry. I wonder if the google might be any help . . . oh, here we go!

“Gothard’s presence here [in Little Rock] can be tracked to his friendship with former Little Rock Mayor Jim Dailey, whose idea it was for Gothard to create a facility in Little Rock to promote faith-based products. . . . “

Gothard. At least, it certainly looks that way. Libby Anne gives more details, then sums up:

Huh. Strange coincidence. At the time Josh Duggar was sent away, Bill Gothard, founder and head of the Institute for Basic Life Principles (IBLP) and the Advanced Training Institute (ATI), operated [a] “training center” in Little Rock. This training center ran a prison ministry, leased some of the building to the police department, and maintained something called “Integrity Construction Institute” for young men. [The center would have been run by a Gothard-appointed local director.] Why, I wonder, is Jim Bob so loathe to mention the fact that it was an ATI training center?

Oh right. It’s probably because last year Gothard was forced to step down after it came to light that he had sexually harassed and molested over thirty teenage and young women working at his facilities, and that the IBLP board had known about this and covered for him for decades. Oops. If Jim Bob isn’t willing to be forthright about the fact that Josh was counseled through a ministry run by an active sex offender, I’m really not sure why I should assume he’s being forthright in the rest of his statements.

Oyyyyyy.

There’s probably something else, too. If Josh was counseled through ATI as Jim Bob statements in the interview suggest, he would almost certainly have been counseled using ATI materials. You can see some of these materials here. These materials have been floating around the internet ever since the story about Josh broke, and wherever they have been read they have evoked outrage for their heavy victim blaming. This may play a role in Jim Bob’s apparent desire not to mention that the “training center” was an ATI facility.

Also, am I the only one seeing some transparently obvious child labor violations?

Yes but never mind all that. Blame the media.

I saw about half of the Duggar sisters’ interview on Fox last night, and it was revolting. It turns out that Josh Duggar did nothing wrong and the Duggar parents did nothing wrong, and the real perpetrator here is the wicked secular agenda-driven news media, for reporting on Josh Duggar’s sexual abuse of his younger sisters.

The Washington Post has highlights.

“We are victims,” Dillard tearfully told Kelly in another portion of the interview. Explaining her reaction to the moment when allegations against her brother came to light last month, she said: “They can’t do this to us.”

“I see it as a re-victimization that’s even 1,000 times worse,” Dillard said.

…

As their parents had in an interview with Fox News on Wednesday, Dillard and Seewald questioned the legality of how In Touch obtained a police report detailing the allegations. “You can’t FOIA juvenile cases, everybody knows that,” Seewald said.

However, legal experts told The Washington Post on Friday that under Arkansas law, the release of the reports — with the victims’ names and relevant pronouns redacted — was likely within the law.

But because other details were given it was obvious that the sisters were the victims.

I can certainly see why the sisters hate that…but at the same time, I don’t think they should minimize the sexual abuse while maximizing the journalistic intrusion.

In another portion of the interview, Seewald defended her brother’s work at the Family Research Council, which included lobbying against same-sex marriage.

“It’s right to say, ‘Here’s what I believe, here’s my values,’ even if you’ve made stupid mistakes or failures,” Seewald said. “If you’ve had failures in your past, it doesn’t mean you can’t be changed. I think that’s where, I think the real issue is people are making this sound like it happened yesterday.”

Oh, I see. LGBT people are evil, but a boy groping his younger sisters is just stupid mistakes.

Josh Duggar and the other Duggars don’t just say “here’s my values”; they say more and worse than that. They do their best to harm people.

But then I have “an agenda.”

Jill Filipovic has a brilliant piece on the Duggars’ interview.

What viewers got was a long defense of the Duggar parents, a minimization of Josh’s crimes, and a fuller illustration of why a misogynist “purity culture” is bad for girls, boys, and sexual assault victims in particular. What the Duggars proved is that their own self-interest in gaining status, influence, and money outweighed the needs of their own daughters — and that Michelle and Jim Bob aren’t just kooky religious extremists, but parents capable of remarkable manipulation and cruelty.

Nobody’s a kooky religious extremist; that’s not a thing. Religious extremism is too destructive and terrible to be kooky.

Josh comes to his parents to say he’s molested his sisters in their bedroom. They don’t do much beyond feel “devastated” (that word comes up a lot in the interview), watch him closely, and tell him not to do it again. He does it again, this time on the couch. They feel devastated. They watch him closely and tell him not to do it again. He does it again, this time under their clothes. At some point he also molests a babysitter. They feel devastated.

After the third time, they decide to get Josh “help” — which doesn’t involve actual trained professionals or licensed therapists, but rather a Christian friend who needed some help with home repairs. Josh goes there, he comes home, his parents take him to the police station, a cop (who is now serving a 56-year sentence for child pornography) gives him a stern talking-to, Josh asks for forgiveness, and everyone moves on. To a reality TV show where the family makes thousands with every episode.

I had to follow that link. The 2009 estimate:

Networks usually won’t disclose the deals they make with individual families. But according to reality producer Terence Michael, the general rule of thumb is that reality-show families earn about 10 percent of a show’s per-episode budget. So, if TLC budgets about $250,000 to $400,000 per episode—and Michael suspects it does—that would mean $25,000 to $40,000 in the Duggars’ pockets for four or five days’ work, which is roughly how long it takes to film a typical episode.

2009. It seems safe to assume it’s a good deal more than that now.

Perhaps the most disturbing part of the story, though, isn’t that the Duggar parents gave Josh three strikes against his sisters before taking any action; it wasn’t that they never actually got him (or, it seems, the girls he molested) professional help from a licensed therapist. The most disturbing part of the story wasn’t even captured on Fox at all. What should disgust us the most — and permanently remove the Duggars from both television and their gilded moral high horse — is how they raised their kids in the aftermath of the abuse.

Key to the Duggar philosophy is sexual purity. In order to be a good, desirable, moral, and honorable person, you must remain “pure” until marriage. Purity is especially important for girls. To not be “pure” is to be, obviously, soiled, dirty, undesirable. While girls have the responsibility to guard their purity, men, who are always authority figures over women, are in charge of controlling and surveilling the girls to make sure they stay in line.

That’s what Josh was doing, but his hand kept slipping.

Compounding the sexual abuse and then the raising of their girls to believe that sexual touch sullies them was the Duggar parents’ decision to put the whole family on TV and turn their then 16 kids into a cash cow.

“They’ve been victimized more by what has happened in these last couple weeks than they were 12 years ago,” Michelle Duggar told Megyn Kelly about her daughters, “because they honestly they didn’t even understand or know that anything had happened until after the fact when they were told about it. In our hearts before God, we haven’t been keeping secrets. We have been protecting those who honestly should be protected. And now what’s happened is they’ve been victimized.”

Now, Michelle says, the Duggar daughters have been victimized — not when their brother was sneaking into their bedrooms to molest them or when he was molesting them on the couch or when their parents never actually got him professional help. It’s now that the story is public. And surely this is awful and traumatizing for them. Surely they do feel victimized.

But who put them on TV in the first place? Who turned them into public figures? Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar invited cameras into their home to put their family in the public eye, both so they could make money and so they could spread their religious beliefs…

Yes but they didn’t have an agenda. The media have an agenda, and the gay people and the liberals and the trans people who want to invade all the rest rooms – they have an agenda, but the Duggars don’t, so it turns out the Duggars are still Great Christian Examples.

I wrote this post on March 27, 2010. For some reason it feels peculiarly relevant again today.

The LA Times notices that the pope has a problem. The problem is that instead of just saying ‘We did a terrible terrible terrible thing, and we did it for decade upon decade,’ the Vatican is lashing out at 1) news outlets that report the terrible things the church has been doing and 2) other institutions that do terrible things. This is infantile and disgusting, and it is unworthy of an institution that (to repeat a point I’ve made a few hundred times) purports to have a higher and better morality than anyone else. It is unworthy because it persists in caring more about the self than the object of the terrible actions. This fact all by itself shows that they are if anything morally worse than the majority of reasonably good people. There’s a reason for that. The reason is this: if you become convinced – if you have good reason to realize – that you have caused appalling harm and suffering to another sentient being, then the only thing you should be feeling about that is agonized repentance. That’s all there is to it. Your angushed empathy and regret should simply inundate all self-concerned feelings, blotting them out of your awareness. This is all the more true if you’re a huge powerful age-encrusted institution that is able to command deference and obedience – right down to literal kneeling – from millions of people and even from heads of state, and the sentient beings are underage, small, weak, and defenseless. You should be grinding your head into the dirt with remorse, in the intervals of doing everything you can to repair the damage to your victims. The last thing you should be doing is even thinking about how all this will affect you. Yet the church is doing exactly that. It’s not surprising, but it damn well is shocking.

Earlier in the week, New York’s archbishop, Timothy Dolan, used his blog to dismiss the New York Times’ reports and defend the pontiff’s record by arguing that authorities outside the church also are culpable…Sadly, this latest everybody-is-responsible-so-nobody-is-to-blame defense is of a piece with a little-noticed section of Benedict’s letter to the Irish church in which he seemed to blame the crisis, in part, on “new and serious challenges to the faith arising from the rapid transformation and secularization of Irish society.”

Ah – it wasn’t little noticed around here. I noticed it, I can tell you. Jumped right on it, I did.

Behold the archbishop of New York, if you can bear to. He certainly has no problem forgetting all about the powerless victims of his powerful church, nor any hesitation about talking like a petulant nine-year-old rebuked for punching a smaller child. Moral squalor at its finest.

What adds to our anger over the nauseating abuse and the awful misjudgment in reassigning such a dangerous man, though, is the glaring fact that we never see similar headlines that would actually be “news”: How about these, for example?

– “Doctor Asserts He Ignored Abuse Warnings,” since Dr. Huth admits in the article that he, in fact, told the archdiocese the abusing priest could be reassigned under certain restrictions, a prescription today recognized as terribly wrong;

– “Doctor Asserts Public Schools Ignored Abuse Warnings,” since the data of Dr. Carol Shakeshaft concludes that the number of cases of abuse of minors by teachers, coaches, counsellors, and staff in government schools is much, much worse than by priests;

And so on and so on and so on, through Judges, Police, Lawyers, District Attorneys, Therapists, and Parole Officers. There’s Love for you, there’s Charity, there’s Agapē. There’s compassion, there’s generosity, there’s giving the shirt also. Yes we did it but so did all those other people so why don’t you yell at them too? Beautiful.

USA Today reports a bit from the Duggars’ interview that shows how completely they still don’t get it – perhaps how incapable they are of ever getting it, because they don’t get the underlying basic point.

Kelly also pressed them on the widespread criticism that they lectured others about sin while covering up their own sins.

“Everybody has things in their past in their families,” Michelle said. “Our son violated God’s principles, and it was terrible what Josh did, it was inexcusable but it was not unforgivable,” added Jim Bob.

See it? They think it’s about “God’s principles.” It’s not. It’s about the well-being of the girls Josh molested – it’s about the harm he did to them. It’s about human beings, not god. Morality is about human beings, not god. The Duggars are probably incapable of ever understanding that.

The Duggars’ interview with Kelly was their first public discussion of the scandal that has deeply damaged their show, their children, their pious image and their conservative GOP politics since InTouch magazine published a story May 21 based on police reports obtained under a Freedom of Information request to Arkansas authorities.

But the interview totally turned that around.

Just kidding.

 

Did you see the Duggars’ interview? I only caught the last 15 minutes (will watch it all eventually, obvs) but that was bad enough – jaw-droppingly disgusting. Michelle bleating away in that self-consciously meek little voice about people who have “an agenda” and how terrible they are.

Kevin Fallon at the Daily Beast has some highlights.

Megyn Kelly may not have wagged a finger at them or damned them to hell, the way so many of us wished she would have. But she did ask them tough, responsible, and necessary questions.

She asked why they protected a son who was harming their daughters. She asked for details that would refute the accusations that they covered his misdeeds up. She asked them if they were hypocrites. She asked specifically about Michelle’s comparing transgender women to child molesters. And Michelle stood by it. “It’s common sense,” she said, proving that she has no blessed idea what “common sense” is.

More, she thinks people accusing them of hypocrisy have an unholy ax to grind.

“Everyone of us has done something wrong. That’s why Jesus came,” she said. “This is more about—there’s an agenda. There are people who are purposing to bring things out and twisting them to hurt and slander.”

Oozing big crocodile tears she said that, while JimBob patted her back consolingly. They were both just a steaming mass of self-pity.

Is it possible to pick just one jaw-dropping, blood-boiling, unfathomable quote from this interview? Oh, there are dozens of them (and counting).

Certainly a frontrunner for the top prize would be when Michelle maintained that her daughters are being more abused by the press in the wake of the uncovering of Josh’s scandal than they were by Josh as children. “They’ve been victimized more by what happened in these last couple weeks than they were 12 years ago,” she said.

Yup, that was a doozy.

At the end Fox played a teaser for the interview with two of the girls that will be aired tomorrow, and they are taking the same line. It’s the press coverage that is the wrong done to them. They’ve been coached well – their whole lives they’ve been coached well.

Josh Marhsall at Talking Points Memo:

In Touch Weekly is reporting that in 2007, when Josh Dugger was 19[,] he sued the Arkansas Department of Human Services to prevent them from making a finding against him or possibly to prevent on-going monitoring of his interactions with his sisters.

I’m writing this here in the Editor’s Blog because In Touch Weekly‘s reporting on this seems thinly sourced and, let’s be honest, In Touch Weekly is not where we normally go for industry standard reporting.

They had documents for the previous stories, but this one is just “as told to.”

According to this report, when local police decided that no crime had been committed within the three year statute of limitations, they nonetheless referred the case to Arkansas’s Families in Need of Services agency. The FNS has a different charge – not criminal culpability but protecting the welfare of children in the state. In other words, the statute of limitations wouldn’t be relevant to their ability or charge to monitor Josh Duggar since he was still living in the Duggar home with his younger sisters.

So a bit less than a year after an anonymous tipster put in motion the chain of events that led to the actual police investigation in 2006, Josh Duggar apparently sued the state to block something the state DHS was doing. This was around the time that the Duggar family reality show was moving into production for its first season in 2008.

So they probably didn’t want quite that much “reality” in their “reality show” about how fabulous they are.

Josh Duggar was apparently successful in his legal action. According to the report, the records of the lawsuit as well as the documentation which the suit was over are both sealed.

Maybe he too will be invited to speak at TAM.

Guest post by Bruce Gorton.

There are relatively few things which anger me more than child abuse.

When I read about Josh Duggar’s abuse of his own sisters, my blood ran cold.

When I read Christians defending it, by saying he was “playing doctor” with his sisters, my blood ran colder.

When I read Christians commenting about how atheists are full of hate, and have nothing but spite for Christians in response to it, my blood stopped running.

It had turned to ice.

Let me be clear here, I am not disgusted because Josh Duggar is a Christian; I am disgusted because he molested his own sisters.

And fourteen is old enough to know better.

I am disgusted because of the tribal apologetics trying to defend his actions at the expense of his sisters.

And they are tribal apologetics, had Josh been named Mohammed there would be no such talk of playing “doctor.”

There is a deep double standard there, wherein it suddenly becomes something other than child abuse the second it becomes your tribe.

That is the thing I most despise about conservatives in general – the idea that the evils of others are harmless in ourselves.

That is why I cannot side with people who try to minimise sexual harassment within atheism, why I cannot side with the US on torture, why I could not side with Richard Dawkins’ statements on pedophilia, why I consider myself neither multi nor mono-cultural.

I am anti-culture, because I do not believe that tribal allegiance matters one whit, what matters is not my culture or even my ideas, but our humanity.

There are some things we should hate, and Christians who would sacrifice their own children to their cultural identity are squarely in that bracket.

And I do not say this because I am an atheist; I say this because I was abused by one of my siblings growing up.

It was not sexual abuse, it is true, it was a sustained campaign of violence and intimidation.

But it was abuse, and I will not excuse those who look the other way because they want to feel forgiving of the pains inflicted on others.

Vyckie does tv news to explain about the Duggars.

 

Teresa MacBain is finding the reporting on Josh Duggar harrowing; it resonates with her experience as a pastor.

I couldn’t shake the deep sorrow that I felt (and feel) for his victims, and the outrage at the way some Christians are ignoring the victims and excusing Duggar’s behavior. Five precious children fell victim to abuse, yet very few are speaking up for them. This is why I can’t remain silent.

It’s really quite astonishing how thoroughly the victims are being ignored and indeed negated by the Christian fans of the Duggars.

Teresa has one pastoral experience burned into her memory:

I received a call from an elderly parishioner one summer day many years ago. She asked me to come by for a visit, which happened often. I’d spent many hours at her home over the years and didn’t think anything of her invitation. .As I walked into her home, I could sense that something wasn’t quite right. Her usual cheerful, bright demeanor was replaced with deep sadness and grief. It felt as if the light in the room was slowly being extinguished. There, in her living room, she opened her mouth to speak, but tears began to stream down her face instead. Once she composed herself,  she told me about her recent discovery that her 6-year-old granddaughter had been sexually molested by her 13-year-old cousin. Pastors are taught to remaining calm and in control, but that ‘skill’ couldn’t keep me from weeping as I sat with this broken-hearted grandmother. I was horrified then and I’m horrified now.

Sorrow is the right response; sorrow for the people harmed; not sanctimonious joy at the redemption of the perpetrator.

This isn’t a lemons into lemonade situation.

Originally a comment by Anna Y on The good Christian family aura.

That last quote is so mind-bogglingly blind I just can’t find the words…

Yes, Josh Duggar abused his sisters (and, according to other sources, also other girl(s) he wasn’t related to). This came to light just now and all of internet is in an uproar. The fact that the entire 19-and-counting show is basically a documentary about the non-stop, 24-7 abuse of every one of those 19 kids apparently doesn’t seem to penetrate anyone’s consciousness. No, I’m not implying that all 19 kids are/were being diddled — there are other kinds of abuse. Being stuck in a panopticon (as a bonus, this particular one is even televised) and raised to conform with a warped standard of Godliness(tm) that is completely unrelated (and mostly contrary) to what’s known about how a young individual of species Homo Sapiens grows and develops (both physically and mentally) is abuse.

I’m not going to pull a Dawkins and rank which abuse is worse here, but I’m willing to bet this kind is pretty horrific too. I guess some people are naturally creeped out by how chipper and perky the Duggar kids are, but apparently no one (or not enough people, not vocally enough) is asking what’s being done to them to make them act this way — after all, that’s not how normal kids normally act.

From infancy they are being put into a virtual pressure-cooker where they are “trained” not only to do as they are told but to do it with a smile and their compliance is evaluated through constant surveillance from both parents and siblings. This family’s response to any “sinful” thoughts and actions as well as a recipe for keeping those at bay is hard work and ignorance and prayer (and all manner of Christian ideological indoctrination that doesn’t quite fit under the label of prayer). It’s basically a police state in miniature.

If some scientists decided to take some babies and experiment on them to see if they could create a “successful” 1984 scenario, they would be branded as monsters. But when it’s parents who are birthing themselves some babies to turn into their idea of model Christians everyone apparently thinks it’s cute and quaint and wholesome and there’s even a TV show about it. Wow.

More stupid shit from someone whose thinking has been completely warped and emptied-out by years upon decades of Christian fanaticism. This someone is called Michael Brown (yes there’s an irony) and he shares his stupid shit with us via the Christian Post.

I have no desire to pile on with more comments about Josh Duggar, who appears to be a very serious and committed Christian who has made no excuses for the sins of his youth and who deeply desires to make a positive impact for the Lord in the years ahead. I simply want to share some redemptive thoughts, supplementing some of the excellent statements made by others, including former governor Mike Huckabee and Southern Baptist leader Russell Moore.

It’s not about “sins.” That’s warped. It warps the conversation and the thinking away from the harm done to human beings to focus instead on putative crimes against God. Notice that Brown doesn’t even mention harm done to human beings in that opening. He doesn’t get to it after that, either – he goes right on ignoring it to talk about other things: things that are less important or illusory or both. His thinking is warped and impoverished by his religious fanaticism. That’s one of the hallmarks of religious fanaticism: it focuses on completely irrelevant and imaginary issues at the expense of real issues that affect real humans.

1. Jesus really does change people. While critics of the Duggar family want to indict them (along with other, evangelical Christians, especially those with large families) for Josh’s actions, and while many seem ready to throw Josh under the bus, the fact is that while he did sin grievously, through repentance, faith and counseling, he became a new man. Jesus really does transform sinners.

That’s not the issue. That’s not the point. It’s not all about Josh; it’s not about Josh first and everyone else later, much less Josh first and everyone else never. It’s not a morality play about Josh’s redemption. That focus is all wrong.

2. There’s no excuse for sin, so own up to it. In today’s culture, almost no one is guilty of anything. It’s someone else’s fault, someone else’s responsibility, not our own. We’re all victims, and the reason we do bad things is because someone else wronged us. Isn’t that how we think today?

I’ve even heard athletes apologize for some really heinous actions by saying, “I’m not happy with the way things happened,” rather than saying, “What I did was wrong and I have no excuses. Please forgive me. I’m seeking to get to the root of my problems and address them.”

What a vast difference between the two attitudes.

As Proverbs states, “Whoever conceals his transgressions will not prosper, but he who confesses and forsakes them will obtain mercy” (Proverbs 28:13).

Wait a minute. Josh Duggar – and his parents – did conceal his “transgressions.” They did conceal them, and by concealing them, were enabled to be tv stars and make lots of money to buy long skirts for all those daughters, and to spread the gospel of fanatical Christian patriarchy.

Michael Brown should cut the bullshit. The Duggars didn’t “own up to” anything until the secret was revealed by others. They don’t get credit for that.

I agree with him about football players weasel-wording their statements about things like punching women in the head. I’ve written about that, in Free Inquiry as well as here. He’s right about that part. But he’s not right that the Duggars are doing anything very different – or even that he is. He’s well into his piece and has yet to mention the people Josh Duggar harmed.

According to the accounts we’ve all heard, Josh confessed his sin to his parents as well as to the proper authorities, and as a family, they worked through the issues. Now, half a lifetime later (he’s 27 and is married with four children), when confronted with a police report about his past, he did not minimize his sin nor did he excuse it. He also resigned from the fine Christian organization for whom he worked, not wanting to bring any negative attention to their work.

Holy crap – what happened to “thou shalt not bear false witness”? Josh did not confess his sins crimes to the proper authorities. Nobody confessed anything to the proper authorities until after the statute of limitations had safely expired.

And “working through the issues” is beside the point. Again – still no mention of the people he harmed. Not even a spelling out of what he actually did. Brown is being at least as evasive and dishonest as those bullshitting football players.

As for resigning from the “fine” homophobic Christian organization he worked for – he wasn’t so forthright and responsible and blame-shouldering that he decided not to work for them in the first place, was he. Consider me not impressed that he resigned when his secret was blown.

When I see someone respond like this, I am filled with hope. In fact, over the years, I’ve seen that people who committed uglier sins but took full responsibility and repented did far better than those who committed less serious sins and tried to sweep them under the rug.

Great. Have a party. Good that you’re happy. Meanwhile, the girls Josh Duggar sexually molested…oh well, who cares about them. They must be sluts.

4. Josh can be an ambassador on behalf of the abused, even helping the abusers as well. While it can feel like your life is over when your past, largely private sins become public (how many of us would like for that to happen?), the fact is that Josh’s future can be bright in the Lord.

He can be an ambassador on behalf of the abused? Wtf? How? Why? Using what diplomatic credentials?

Why the hell would anyone who has been sexually abused want Josh Duggar as an “ambassador”? He has yet to show the slightest awareness that sexual abuse is bad for the abused.

He can call on others who are sinning to come clean and get help, using his own example redemptively. And he can encourage those who have been abused to realize that they are not guilty and should not feel shame, also encouraging churches to embrace those who come for help rather than making them feel as if there is something wrong with them.

No he can’t. He and his family believe the abused are guilty, so no, he’s the last person who can do any of that.

There are eight more paragraphs after that, in which he still does not mention the people Josh Duggar sexually molested. He does not mention them once in the whole article.

A year ago Recovering Grace took an extensive look at the kind of “teaching” the Duggar children had about sexual abuse of children within a family. It’s enough to make your hair stand on end so hard it dances. “There is no victim,” the title states dryly.

Today, Recovering Grace looks at past Advanced Training Institute (ATI) and Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP) materials that address the topics of sexual abuse, child molestation within a nuclear family, and domestic violence. This is not presented as an exhaustive survey, but is the full range of printed Institute material on these topics thatRecovering Grace is aware of and has in our current library. We desire to present an accurate representation of Institute materials on these topics, so please share with us any materials we may have missed.

This is a year ago, so it wasn’t about Josh Duggar in particular. I recommend reading and studying the whole thing; it’s horrific.

The husband in that scenario is doing his wife a favor by being hostile to her. The more horrible you are to people, the more of a favor you’re doing them.

The Our Most Important Messages booklet was written for Basic Seminar alumni, and takes us into the Institute’s teachings on authority structures and the “umbrella of authority,” topics on which many words have been spilled over the past fifty years. The former ATI students who have shared their stories with Recovering Grace after facing sexual harassment, abuse, or assault in a family or Institute setting, or at the hands of outside authority figures, have almost universally cited the role of the Institute’s authority teachings in initial personal confusion about the abusive experience, and in later attempts to deal with the experience’s aftermath. While we cannot do this topic justice in a short space, a chart in the Basic Seminar Followup Course booklet How To Get Under God’s Protection: The Principle of Authority illustrates the complex position of the hypothetical mother in the Q&A above. The generic chart does not address sexual abuse specifically, but is the foundation upon which the authority language of Our Most Important Messages is based. Should the hypothetical mother in Our Most Important Messages “flee if forced to do evil,” the evil in this case being the possible repeat of sexual abuse of her children? Should she separate from her husband despite possible financial hardships, and thus “suffer for refusing to do evil”? No, she is admonished to “appeal to the authorities,” and instructed how to work her way up through levels of authority, neither leaving with her children nor going first to law enforcement.

Then there’s the Umbrella of Protection.

If identifying the correct authority interaction scenario is challenging for adults, it is even murkier for sexually abused minors. The same HowTo Get Under God’s Protection booklet gives a succinct introduction to the “umbrella of protection,” arguably the Institute’s most widely disseminated and enduring meme. Central to the concept is the fact that under the umbrella, “nothing can happen to us that God did not design for his glory and our ultimate good,” while out from under the umbrella, “we expose ourselves to the realm and power of Satan’s control.”

But what if “His” glory and my ultimate good are in conflict? I know, we’re supposed to think that’s impossible, but…I’m not convinced it is.

What about moral failures in a family? It turns out those are about little girls running around naked after their baths, and girl babies having their diapers changed. They’re all immodest little whores, is what they are.

That’s all clear enough, I think. This guy had to change his infant sisters’ diapers, so of course he ended up sexually abusing them. The harlots tempted him.

Here’s a sciencey part, that diagrams the parts of the person:

I get it. Body is least important, and hurting the unimportant body—>good things for The Spirit – so, again, the abuser is doing the abused a big favor. Thank you, abuser.

Why did God let it happen? Because she wore immodest dress, thus defrauding her abuser or abusers. It’s her fault. She ruined his life, or their lives. Women are baaaaaaaaaaaaad.

There’s a lot more.

From Libby Anne’s first post on the Duggar mess: some important points.

8. The good Christian family aura can hide underlying problems. If I had a dollar for every time someone has praised the Duggars for being a perfect example of a good Christian family, I’d be rich. Sweet smiles and matching clothes can cover up a lot and make people assume that things are more perfect than they are. I know what it’s like to force a smile for family pictures people later ooo and ahh over, even as I’m crying inside. We need to remember that.

I’ve experienced that deception the few times I’ve taken a brief look at that show. On the one hand they make my flesh crawl, but on the other hand I keep thinking: “They do look very cheerful and happy and perky.” The sweet smiles are annoyingly effective.

9. Sheltering children from the world doesn’t work. For years now, I have seen commenters across the internet praise the Duggars for raising godly children away from the materialism and sexualization of the modern world. Sorry guys, it doesn’t work like that. Please stop promoting the Duggars’ lifestyle by claiming that it has protected these children from the evils of the world! It hasn’t.

Mind you, if you define secular education as an evil, it has protected them from that…

10. Homeschooling can limit children’s ability to report abuse. Children who attend school have contact with teachers, counselors, and other adults they can go to for help, or for advice about problems in their home situations. Both Josh and his victims were homeschooled, which almost certainly limited the number of trusted adults they could go to for help, especially given that their social activities appear to have revolved around their church and other likeminded families who probably also believed in dealing with such problems in-house. According to the police report, some of the victims did try to get help. It’s just that their avenues for obtaining said help were sadly limited.

And their welfare wasn’t a high priority.

I heard about this on Facebook this morning via Vyckie; now RawStory is reporting on it.

Responding to criticism of the Christian “Quiverfull” movement, the wife of a Texas pastor who promotes the “be fruitful, and multiply” philosophy, took to Facebook to explain that admitted child-molester Josh Duggar was “playing doctor” as a teen and should be “left alone to live a good life.”

The conservative fundamentalist Quiverfull movement sees children as a blessing from God and promotes constant procreation, eschewing all forms of birth control.

In her rant on Facebook, Carrie Hurd, wife of Heritage Covenant Church Pastor Patrick Hurd, blasted Quiverfull critic Vyckie Garrison for being critical of Duggar, and Christians in general.

She defends Josh Duggar and blasts Vyckie Garrison. Strange priorities.

Despite having her own Facebook account, Hurd used her husband’s account to address Garrison and defend Duggar who stepped down from his position with the Family Research Council after it was revealed that he molested five young girls — including his sisters — when he was in his teens.

“Vyckie, this is actually Pat’s wife, Carrie. You women want parity in the board room and you want equal wages all the way up the ladder, but when it comes to taking responsibility and being equal in other areas, it is always the man’s fault or responsibility. How many women bait, hit first, but are seldom arrested for abuse………….?” she wrote.

Say what? A woman should be taking responsibility for Josh Duggar’s having groped his younger sisters?

Michelle Duggar certainly bears some of the responsibility, but given the patriarchal rules she promotes and follows, she doesn’t bear as much as The Man of the family, Jimbob.

Hurd then criticized Garrison for “trolling” the news for stories critical of Christianity, and suggested she go to Iraq to “fight ISIS.”

“You troll the news for any little Christian misbehavior. Get a life! Go to Iraq and fight ISIS if you are seriously worried about women being treated well by men and society.”

Additional information on the Quiverfull movement can be found at No Longer Quivering, written by former member Garrison who was recently named “Atheist of the Year” by the American Atheist Association.

Yes she was, so ha, Carrie Hurd.

Mike Huckabee on Josh Duggar and the Duggar family:

Janet and I want to affirm our support for the Duggar family. Josh’s actions when he was an underage teen are as he described them himself, ‘inexcusable,’ but that doesn’t mean ‘unforgivable.’ He and his family dealt with it and were honest and open about it with the victims and the authorities. No purpose whatsoever is served by those who are now trying to discredit Josh or his family by sensationalizing the story. Good people make mistakes and do regrettable and even disgusting things. The reason that the law protects disclosure of many actions on the part of a minor is that the society has traditionally understood something that today’s blood-thirsty media does not understand—that being a minor means that one’s judgement is not mature. No one needs to defend Josh’s actions as a teenager, but the fact that he confessed his sins to those he harmed, sought help, and has gone forward to live a responsible and circumspect life as an adult is testament to his family’s authenticity and humility.

Those who have enjoyed revealing this long ago sins in order to discredit the Duggar family have actually revealed their own insensitive bloodthirst, for there was no consideration of the fact that the victims wanted this to be left in the past and ultimately a judge had the information on file destroyed—not to protect Josh, but the innocent victims. Janet and I love Jim Bob and Michelle and their entire family. They are no more perfect a family than any family, but their Christian witness is not marred in our eyes because following Christ is not a declaration of our perfection, but of HIS perfection. It is precisely because we are all sinners that we need His grace and His forgiveness. We have been blessed to receive God’s love and we would do no less than to extend our love and support for our friends. In fact, it is such times as this, when real friends show up and stand up. Today, Janet and I want to show up and stand up for our friends. Let others run from them. We will run to them with our support.

Mike Huckabee on people who aren’t his Christofascist friends:

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) said on Wednesday that gay-rights activists wouldn’t be satisfied until there are no more churches or Christians in America.

“It won’t stop until there are no more churches, until there are no more people who are spreading the Gospel,” Huckabee said on a right-wing radio program while discussing the backlash against anti-gay religious-freedom legislation in Arkansas and Indiana.

“I’m talking now about the unabridged, unapologetic Gospel that is really God’s truth,” he said.

Huckabee made the remarks during an appearance on the conservative Family Research Council radio program “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins.”

The SPLC has a dossier on the Family Research Council, former employers of Josh Duggar.

The Family Research Council (FRC) bills itself as “the leading voice for the family in our nation’s halls of power,” but its real specialty is defaming gays and lesbians. The FRC often makes false claims about the LGBT community based on discredited research and junk science. The intention is to denigrate LGBT people in its battles against same-sex marriage, hate crimes laws, anti-bullying programs and the repeal of the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.

To make the case that the LGBT community is a threat to American society, the FRC employs a number of “policy experts” whose “research” has allowed the FRC to be extremely active politically in shaping public debate. Its research fellows and leaders often testify before Congress and appear in the mainstream media. It also works at the grassroots level, conducting outreach to pastors in an effort to “transform the culture.”

The SPLC provides a selection of quotations.

“[H]omosexual activists vehemently reject the evidence which suggests that homosexual men … are … relative to their numbers, more likely to engage in such actions [childhood sexual abuse] than are heterosexual men.”
– Peter Sprigg, Senior Fellow for Policy Studies at FRC, on why the Boy Scouts should not allow LGBT Scouts or leaders, FRC blog, February 1, 2013.

…

“We believe the evidence shows … that relative to the size of their population, homosexual men are more likely to engage in child sexual abuse than are heterosexual men.”
— Peter Sprigg, “Debating Homosexuality: Understanding Two Views.” 2011.

“While activists like to claim that pedophilia is a completely distinct orientation from homosexuality, evidence shows a disproportionate overlap between the two. … It is a homosexual problem.”
— FRC President Tony Perkins, FRC website, 2010

…

“Gaining access to children has been a long-term goal of the homosexual movement.”
— Robert Knight, FRC director of cultural studies, and Frank York, 1999

…

“One of the primary goals of the homosexual rights movement is to abolish all age of consent laws and to eventually recognize pedophiles as the ‘prophets’ of a new sexual order.”
—1999 FRC publication, “Homosexual Behavior and Pedophilia,” Robert Knight and Frank York

Oops.