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. As the incestuous orthopedist once said:Give me a mother-fucking break.[1]
First off, let us start with the cold hard brutal facts:Josh Duggar is a sexual predator.
He molested his sisters as a teen, confessed, then went back and molested them again.[2]
He then had his offense covered up by local authorities, his church, and his parents.
He received a fat cushy job as a professional scold at the Family Research Council thanks to his parents “reality” show fame.[3]
He then paid nearly a thousand dollars to “guarantee” an affair from the infamous Ashley Madison website, signed up for an online dating serviceusing 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:This 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.
He 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.[4]
Just because they focus their obsession on sexual purity doesn’t mean they aren’t deviant.
There is nothing that human beings can’t turn into either a weapon or a sexual fetish, if not both.
Let’s rack back the focus and look at the roots of the cult the Duggars belong to:TheIndependent Fundamentalist Baptistchurch movement and its close association withBill Gothard’sInstitute in Basic Life Principles and Advanced Training Institutehome schooling efforts that have proved to be the backbone of theQuiverful 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.
To paraphrase The Joker:
“I know a sexual deviant when I see one, and…”
Now, before delving further into that topic, I need to 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, 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, butverboten.
Look, 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.
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:
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[5] and didn’t literally intend for people to go around maiming themselves in order to better serve God.[6]
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.
Yeah, blame the wife -- that joke always works!
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.
.
.
.
[1] Normally I play it coy on my blog and Facebook pages, substituting grawlixes or crucial letters in the spelling of my profanities, but not today, folks. Today we are going to be discussing human morality, human ethics, human sexuality, human desire, and human corruption, so if you can’t stand the fucking heat, I suggest you get out of the fucking bedroom.
[2] 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.
[3] 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.
[4] David Gerrold has observed the anti-gay crowd spends far more time obsessing over gay sex than gay men ever do. This may explain why so many of them get arrested in airport men’s rooms.
[5] Like he did with his remarks about beams of wood being in people’s eyes or camels crawling through the eye of a needle, etc.
[6] ‘Cuz we sure haven’t had waves of Purity Movement followers gouging out their eyes or whacking off their weinnies to make Him happy…