Those Darn Duggars

That family of insane sexual fetish cult followers the Duggars are trying to crawl back into the limelight.

Like junkies jonesin’ for the cheapest tar heroin they can find, they want to creep back into the mainstream and ruin a few thousand more lives.

These people are bad news, and while I’m perfectly willing to forgive ‘em on an individual basis, when they reappear as a group promoting their bogus lifestyle, they need to be metaphorically gut-stomped and gut-stomped hard.

Purely metaphorically, of course.

Here are three old Duggar post consolidated into one, with a little updating and editing thrown in. (You can find the original posts elsewhere on this blog, but due to our change from WordPress to SquareSpace they’re now missing their graphics and in some places are hard to read.)

. . . . .

I had a post all set to go on the latest Josh Duggar fiasco called “The 21st Century Badger Game” but then I received a couple of messages accusing me of being unfair and unforgiving to Josh in particular and the Duggars in general. 

First off, let us start with the cold hard brutal facts:

Josh Duggar is a sexual predator.

He molested his sisters as a teen, as well as a teen baby sitter who was spending the night at the Duggar house while Jim-Bob and Michelle were off pressing the flesh at some political function.  

He confessed, then went back and molested them again.

He then had his offense covered up by local authorities, his church, and his parents.

Thanks to his parents “reality” show fame, he received a fat cushy job as a professional scold at the Family Research Council -- which at no time mentioned his predatory sexual behavior as a teen.  

(Look, this wasn’t two toddlers playing doctor, it wasn’t a mutually agreed upon make-out session between two junior high students, it was an adolescent boy sneaking into the rooms of his sleeping sisters and a non-family member and by his own admission fondling them over and under their clothes. That’s as creepy as hell and needs to be corrected immediately. If the Duggars had been upfront about this from day 1 of their TV show, if they had included this information into their presentation, then maybe they could cling to a shred of dignity and integrity. But they didn’t; they hid it fearing it would undermine their perfect family image and negatively impact their ratings. Which it did.)

Josh Duggar then paid nearly a thousand dollars to “guarantee” an affair from the infamous Ashley Madison website, signed up for an online dating service using another man’s photo, and friended several strippers and exotic dancers on Facebook.

All while telling us how we are supposed to live.

I’m counting a minimum of three strikes here:
Josh Duggar is a man who has forever lost any expectation of ever being taken seriously in matters of ethics / morality / family / fidelity / love.

But he is not to be hated,
he is to be pitied.

Josh Duggar is the product of a deviant sex cult, and just because the cult’s focus is on “purity” doesn’t mean they aren’t any more sexually obsessed than those they have delighted in attacking over the years.

Indeed, I think a very strong case can be made that they are more sexually obsessed than any other group.

Just because they focus their obsession on sexual purity doesn’t mean they aren’t deviant.

Let’s rack back the focus and look at the roots of the cult the Duggars belong to: The Independent Fundamentalist Baptist church movement and its close association with Bill Gothard’s Institute in Basic Life Principles and Advanced Training Institute, home schooling efforts that have proved to be the backbone of the Quiverful movement.

For simplicity’s sake, we shall refer to this as The Purity Movement.

I know a little bit about human desire and sexuality from having worked both sides of the pornographer’s desk; I make no bones about my employment as an editor for Penthouse back in the mid-1990s.

I encountered a lot of kink in my job, and saw things that would make a Mormon’s head explode. I learned a few absolute truths along the way, the first and foremost being that there is nothing -- repeat, NOTHING -- that doesn’t get somebody’s motor running, and the second being that those most critical of other people’s sexuality are those with the greatest anxiety about their own.

But before delving further into that topic, let me ratchet things back a bit further still by comparing American Protestantism with European Catholicism.

American Protestants like to believe all moral and ethical choices are simple black and white decisions: Always either one thing or the other.

Catholics are more comfortable with what computer programmers refer to as “fuzzy logic”:  Any given issue does not have a single yea or nay question but in reality contains dozens if not scores if not hundreds of smaller questions in them, and in the end a big picture decision invariably involves making what seems like some bad decisions at the micro level in order to secure a more optimum outcome at the macro level.

Back to The Purity Movement.
As stated, they have sexually fetishized “purity”, a perversion of Christian doctrine that places virginity worship at its apex.

They possess an all too typical American Protestant viewpoint that the only possible alternative to absolute rigid unyielding sexual morality in the form of draconian enforced chastity is an equally absolute libertine lifestyle of mandatory free sex between / among all genders.

Oh, do I ever call shenanigans on that!

Look, all sexual ethics start with one key irrefutable point:  No person is ever required to engage in any intimacy unless they are doing so of their own fully informed consent.

Period.
Full stop.

That’s a far, far cry from the ultra-permissive parody that exists in the minds of most followers of The Purity Movement. One can still advocate moral restraint in sexual matters without requiring the destruction of the human psyche in the process.

In The Purity Movement, all sexual thoughts / interests / ideas / desires prior to or outside of marriage are verboten.

Not something to be controlled,
not something to be dealt with,
but verboten.

Even healthy natural curiosity is squelched and slut-shamed to make people feel more worthless and more depraved.

Okay, I get it; I’ve had ample exposure to various kinks that derive their sexual gratification through masochism and humiliation. You wanna get your rocks off by dwelling on what a worthless sac of human excrement you are because you acknowledge another human being’s attractiveness, hey, go right ahead.

Fly your freak flag high.

But don’t drag little kids into it.

I’ve been tracking The Purity Movement for several years now, and eventually want to do a more fully researched in-depth piece on them, but suffice it to say, they are no different from any other sexual fetish group out there:  They have perverted not just natural and normal human desire but also the gospel of Christ, turning it from a life of love and compassion and forgiveness into a horrendous mash-up of KJV and 1984, designed and engineered by a leadership that uses their teachings not to introduce followers to the life of joy and fellowship that Christ has in store for them but to weaken them and control them and make them more compliant victims.

It is a movement with a long documented -- and one might add, wholly expected -- history of horrific child & spousal abuse, sexual/psychological/emotional/spiritual.

It espouses a series of character values that at first glance seem admirable, but on closer examination prove to be full of paradoxical self-contradicting pronouncements of the Arbeit Macht Frei / Ignorance Is Strength / Shit Is Shinola variety.

It’s part of their long standing effort to crush every hint of “rebellion” and “original sin” in a child by destroying their unique individual personalities and stamping them out in cookie cutter molds of their parents, who in turn are cookie cutter molds of the movement’s founders and leaders.

I don’t have the time / space / inclination to go into great detail on The Purity Movement here & now, but here’s a quote from the Duggars themselves on how they deal with sexual temptation whenever they encounter a female in public who isn't dressed as modestly as a Duggar girl:

"’Nike’ [is] a signal to the boys, and even to Dad, that they should nonchalantly drop their eyes and look down at their shoes as we walk past her... It's meant to help keep the guys' eyes from seeing things they shouldn't be seeing. By using the single-word signal, the warning can be given quietly and discreetly." -- from Growing Up Duggar

Seriously?

Seriously?!?!?

Yeah, Christ taught one should cut off one’s hand or gouge out one’s eye rather than let it lead one into sin, but y’know, he was probably using hyperbole when he said that (as with his remarks about wooden beams in people’s eyes, camels crawling through the eye of a needle, etc.).  He didn’t literally intend for people to go around maiming themselves in order to better serve God (otherwise we’d have waves of Purity Movement followers gouging out their eyes or whacking off their weinnies to make him happy).

Instead of recognizing human sexuality is a part of human nature, and that almost all people -- young kids especially -- are curious about matters sexual and / or find other people physically attractive, The Purity Movement seeks to terrorize them into blind mindless fearful obedience -- which of course makes it sooooo much easier to take advantage of and victimize people who have no coping mechanisms, no ability to independently report a wrong done to them, no assurance whatsoever that their family and friends won’t turn against them and expel them from the community if they should ever dare report their abuse to anyone.

So, back to those who posted messages to me about Josh Duggar: No, I don’t hate him.

I think it’s a great academic question to ask if he would have been this messed up had he not been raised as part of The Purity Movement, but that point’s moot now:  They made it possible for him to climb and fall and climb higher and fall deeper and then deeper still.

But they will never hold him accountable, much less themselves.

If people wonder why the Christian church is imploding in America, why people raised in it since childhood are leaving it in record numbers, the answer is that we have failed our duties and we have let perverts and deviants and ravenous wolves loose among the flock, and when they lay waste to the brethren, at best we tsk-tsk it and at worse we make excuses and apologies for it.

This shit has gotta stop.

We cannot afford to let self-centered intellectual and moral imbeciles be the face of Christ in this world.

We need to call bullshit on bullshit when it happens, and we need to see that wrong doers who cloak themselves in the robes of the church are held accountable for the havoc they wreak.

That’s not hatred.

That’s not contempt.

That’s not vengeance.

That’s justice.

. . . . .

Shortly after I posted that, someone took umbrage with it:

“like them or not you are commanded by Christ to love them - your words do not exemplify that - no matter how loathsome you may find their words or deeds you are called to love them - you do not have to accept them or approve of them - but you do have to love them - call them to task for what you see as their faults or failures but you have to do it in a spirit of love - not in a snarky sarcastic way - THAT is how others will know you are a disciple of Christ”

Christian, please…

First off, Josh Duggar is a sexual predator.

The Duggar clan are sexual deviants.

The Independent Fundamentalist Baptist churches, the Bill Gothard led faction of same, and the whole Purity Movement have perverted the gospel of Christ.

These are inarguable facts.

Pretending these facts are not true by refusing to call them what they are is not going to help anybody.

Josh Duggar checked in to “rehab” for treatment of his “sexual addiction.”

I use quotes because addicts can’t self-diagnose themselves; they may indeed have that particular problem, but it takes trained professionals to recognize all the symptoms and help locate the root of the problem.

I use quotes because the “rehab” facility is is attending has no medically or legitimately trained personnel; it is yet another extension of the same basic mind-warping / soul-killing / child-abusing IFB cult that both directly and indirectly made Josh Duggar what he is today!

Sending him to that facility is like trying to conduct an AA meeting at a bar during happy hour.

They will do nothing to fix his problem, because they are the problem:
Their grossly distorted, domineering, sexually deviant, soul crippling theology that attracts the spiritually and intellectually fearful.

It would be bad enough if their toxic nonsense was just confined to their own group, but that’s not the case: They crowd themselves in front of microphones and cameras, determined to shout down all attempts to try and present the genuine gospel of Christ at work.

They are modern day Pharisees, concocting an ever widening network of laws and rules and regulations and rituals and practices that are guaranteed to make worse the lives of anyone who tries to follow them.

They are precisely what Christ championed against in his brief ministry on earth.

People are leaving Christianity, and they’re leaving it because we are letting the moral imbeciles and the con men and the slickee boiz get away with their crimes and perversions.

The Duggars, at least Jim-Bob and Michelle, are not victims but perpetrators.  He’s a hack politician who couldn’t even please the undemanding electorate of Arkansas. She’s his enabler. Together they milk the system to enrich themselves without regard to any havoc they wreak.

Wanna see the Duggar true colors?

After their “we’re a wonderful family and you’re not” show was canceled (because they hid the fact their son had molested his kid sisters while they were away pressing political flesh), they tried to crawl back on TV by pitching a show where they would “counsel” victims of sexual abuse.

This after Jim-Bob blithely asserted child molesting by older teen sons goes on all the time in fundamentalist families.

Good lord -- these people have no shame!  (I don’t, either, but then I’m quick to point that out to people.) 

They, in fact, hide behind a false mask of pious humility.

Do not try to protect these people. They cannot be forgiven and loved until they stop harming others, and by that I mean shutting the fnck up and getting out of the public conscious and acknowledging the system they embrace causes far more problems than it purportedly solves.

You wanna love and forgive ‘em, fine.
Just don’t let them keep spewing
their nonsense out to the world at large.

© Buzz Dixon