Like any other Progressive with a brain and a gag reflex, I'm beyond horrified at what Josh Duggar did and at the Duggar family's crying, lying, ignorant, blind-eyed, careless, woe-is-us, spin-making, irresponsible, parent-fail story. I know what you're saying: Geez, tell me what you really think. It doesn't help that I am the mother of two daughters and if someone we knew had done that to them I'd have a carving knife in one hand while I called the nearest appropriate authority on the bastard with the other. I've seen too often what incestuous abuse does to girls.
1. Michelle Duggar, stand up for yourself and your kids. Men, husbands, are fallible and by clinging to a religion that demands you sit down, shut up, and keep your vagina exposed for one man's pleasure you're surrendering everything you are as a person (we won't even get into the woman part right now)--your mind, heart, intellect, independence, and worst of all your ability to think and act with freewill. As a mother this situation should have horrified you enough to tell JB to buy himself a blow-up doll and leave you the hell alone until this was all dealt with the right way. I don't care what religion you claim to belong to--you are responsible for your actions (or lack of), indignation (or lack of), and responsible parenting (or inability to); baby, as a living, breathing, thinking human you can't shrug off your inaction and lousy decisions on "the movement" or your willing submission (makes me feel dirty just typing that) to your highly fallible, ignorant husband. These kinds of things don't right themselves. You have to take action--no matter how difficult it may seem. For your daughters' sakes, if not for your own, act like a mother with a brain.
2. I cannot listen one more time to "he came crying to us to confess." Sorry, but if he'd been getting away with it, fondling freely at night while mom and dad made baby number 14 or 15, no teen boy in his right mind would confess anything. Teen boys are great at keeping secrets about sexual urges and they certainly don't cry about them to their parents in a sudden onrush of remorse (especially when it appears the parents are too busy having sex to properly inform their kids about its many subtleties). My guess is he didn't show remorse or shed a tear until he got caught. So, Duggars, did it occur to you that maybe withholding information about sex and sexual urges and behaviors might have been a bad thing? No need to answer. What's additionally scary is that he was probably doing a lot of late-night personal on-rushing while thinking about the inappropriate fondling and then smiling over his dampened sheets. How many times over how many years did Joshy do that after he got caught? Don't answer that either.
3. Religious folly. That's what this is all coming to. In America today, due to fundamental and evangelical teachings, taboos, and restrictions we are suffering through a worse period of ignorance and squeamishness than ever before. Religious folly has us ashamed to talk openly about sex to our kids, fearful of nudity (have you seen the ravings about public breastfeeding?), and all fig-leaf loony over our own humanness. It's enough to make a thinking Progressive want to move to Europe where secular ideas have more value than trumped up religious ones, which sadly are rising to a screaming crescendo that threatens to make this country a bigger laughingstock than it already is.
Okay, I feel better. Message continues below the orange pocket snake.