Megyn Kelly promises us she's just going to let the Duggars "tell their story" not "cross examine" them like there's some kind of crime. — Bob Schooley (@Rschooley) June 2, 2015 It's interesting how infrequently the fact that Jim Bob Duggar is a Republican politician is mentioned. — Bob Schooley (@Rschooley) June 2, 2015 Yes, …
Late Night Horrorshow: Duggar Collateral DamagePost + Comments (43)
Libby Anne, at Patheos, on “the silencing power of forgiveness“:
… Anna Duggar (Josh’s wife) is an example of what many women coming out of the Duggar’s fundamentalist Christian subculture go through. They get married young after a brief courtship. (Because of family pressure and perhaps a desperate need to get out of their parents’ home.) They don’t really know the person they are marrying, and they are too inexperienced (having no sex ed, previous boyfriends, or real-world experience) to recognize any red flags that might have risen by this point. They can’t use birth control (because sinful) so they start having children right away.
Anna now has three, with a fourth on the way. She is 26 years old. She was homeschooled her whole life and never went to college. She now claims that she knew when the courtship began that Josh was a child molester. But I very much doubt that Josh used those words — it is far more likely that he said he had “temptations” to which he “succumbed” but “God is good” and he has “asked for forgiveness.” And, in that culture, she would have had no choice but to accept that for face value, because to do otherwise would be to call Josh a liar and to doubt God’s ability to save. Now she’s found out the truth, she has a few more years of experience, and she’s more trapped than she’s ever been…
From Libby Anne’s archives, back in 2012: “Carefully scripted lives: My concerns about the Duggars” :
… The fact is, the Duggars aren’t just your ordinary family plus seventeen extra children. There is a great deal of editing that goes into making TV, and one thing that gets edited out are the Duggars’ religious beliefs and their beliefs about child rearing. There is much, much more going on here than you see on TV.
I know this because I grew up in a family very much like the Duggars. We had a third fewer kids and we didn’t have a TV show, but otherwise it was about the same. Our beliefs were nearly identical to theirs, as was our way of living. When I look at the older Duggar girls, I see myself. I was them. With that in mind, I’m going to take a moment to outline nine specific concerns I have about the Duggars.
1. Isolation and Indoctrination
The Duggar childern are homeschooled in part in order to shelter them from bad influences, i.e. from other kids and teachers who hold different beliefs or live different sorts of lives. The Duggar kids don’t have friends who aren’t pre-approved by their parents. In fact, the Duggar kids aren’t even involved in church activities – their family participates in a “home church” where they and several other like-minded families get together on Sunday mornings and worship together.Furthermore, even the older Duggar children are not allowed to go anywhere without having an “accountability partner,” i.e. another sibling, to keep tabs on them. When one of the older boys volunteered at the local fire department, one of his sisters always went with him to keep an eye on him and make sure he didn’t get in trouble…
2. Children raising children
If you think Michelle is the one raising all of those kids, think again. Those older daughters, some of them already adults, are the ones who are actually doing the majority of the cooking, cleaning, and childcare. They are, in effect, raising their younger siblings.Now I’m not saying Michelle sits back and watches soap operas while the kids work, but rather that with that many children there is simply too much for her to do on her own. She doesn’t have the time or energy to raise her children without her older daughters’ help. And fortunately, because the Duggars homeschool, those older daughters are available to help 24/7…
3. Authoritarian discipline
Though they have not directly admitted it, there is a lot to indicate that the Duggars follow Michael and Debi Pearl’s discipline methods. This means they require absolute obedience from their children and see even bad attitudes as signs of disobedience. It also means they use corporal punishment. The Pearls suggest that you begin to spank your children at around six months, and they urge parents to spank a disobedient child until that child submits completely…The Duggars have stated that they use blanket training. What they do is place a baby on a blanket and tell the baby not to get off. If the baby crawls off, he or she is spanked on the leg, told “no,” and placed back on the blanket. If you do this for long enough, the baby will learn to stay on the blanket, and then you can safely leave the baby there while you cook lunch or school the older ones. This all seems counter to the nature of a naturally curious baby…
If you wonder why the Duggar girls never spoke up, despite having an “audience” of TV-millions, it’s because they’ve been physically disciplined since they were infants to believe that resistance is futile.
Further reading, if you need it: Gawker has “The Duggar Homeschool Program’s Terrifying Advice on Sexual Assault.”
Imagine if the Duggars followed some “un-American” religious cult — say, one that mandated forcing their daughters to wear headscarves instead of horrible 80s perms. Fox News would be encouraging every Christianist wingnut on the internet to go wave placards and second-Amendment totems at the family compound, and the GOP candidates who let Josh massage their egos for the cameras would be calling for Benghazi-scale investigations into whether President Obama once shook hands with a third cousin of the patriarch’s assistant at the family used-car dealership.