Churchhoney

Well, Gothardism -- a philosophy and self-help system of sorts rather than a church -- was deliberately designed to fit or at least be fittable with all conservative and conservativish Protestant churches. BG didn't want to deprive himself of any takers (read: dollars and source of young girls/women to mess with) because he went too much in any one Protestant direction -- he didn't prioritize Calvinist or Baptist thinking, for example. People could bring their Baptist or Methodist or Presbyterian or whatever beliefs into his world that they wanted. All he was interested in doing was telling them how to keep their kids under control (and, more stealthily, how to keep their women under control.) And he could find people who wanted that in any church group, especially back in the 60s, 70s and 80s when modern chidlhood and teenagerdom were shocking some people a lot.

Everybody on the program seems to have an actual adult job, profession or vocation. Maybe somebody said, Stop it with dragging in this student every damn time. And I'm sorry but I don't think Jessa looks good with all that hair. There's just too much of it.

The article, which was published in 2015, says this -- "Arkansas is one of two states that prohibits homeschooling in households that include registered sex offenders." *the other state was Pennsylvania) And of course they only note that the Duggs COULD have lost the ability to homeschool -- had he been declared a registered offender. The homeschool rules shift a lot and I don't know how often they update everything on their site. But the group that wrote the article try hard to keep a high standard of accuracy, so I'm sure they were correct about Arkansas law at the time, at least. ... And since a law like that was so rare and was probably enacted in response to some hideous event or other, it seems that it's probably a hard one to convince legislators to repeal, once you've got it on the books As of 2020, HSLDA (Home School Legal Defense Association), said that if you;re in Arkansas and have a registered sex offender living in your home, you should "seek individualized guidance" about starting a homeschool......So it sounds as if something is still on the books, although maybe it has loopholes added or something.

Not totally convinced she'd've never been a cheerleader. I can see her gritting her teeth and doing it if she thought there was something significant to gain, as she does in her current situation......She may not jump and yell, but she certainly shows frenetic enthusiasm for her parents' evil, asinine Gothardism in those lengthy video paeans she periodically makes for them and posts for the general public and her millions of followers. I wonder if she isn't one of the Duggarlings who's harmed most by not having the chance to be either of the things you mention. If anything, her current life seems as if it may be making her less energetic and more sour all the time. I feel as if, while some of the Duggarlings can be fairly content in the small world they've been handed, Jessa's likely a person who'd; be way better off if she'd had more freedom, options and a wider world to operate in and cope with. She doesn't seem to enjoy much of anything that's available in her world, including parenting. So where does she go from here? There's only so much that enjoying coffee can do for you.

Whoever wrote it was probably just looking for stuff with Josh's and/or Anna's name on it. They probably had no idea about the crazy history of the llcs as the JB beat-the-tax-code shell game, appearing and disappearing and shifting in and out of various people's names with no actual connection to those people at all.

MacArthur has generally been pro-vaccine (though anti-all-the-other-public-health-measures). So I'm thinking Jer and company probably are vaccinated. He still might not want to talk about it, though, in case JM changes his mind.

I think Jer might not want them to make many public statements about Covid precautions lest he accidentally piss off his boss. MacArthur's views have been a little mixed. They've mostly seemed to be pro-vaccine but anti-mask and anti-social-distancing. But people connected to the church seem to see him as increasingly hard to predict, making it better to keep your mouth shut about touchy subjects. And Covid definitely is one of those with him. I can't see Jer saying anything that he's not absolutely sure MacArthur will approve of.

Well, those are certainly, um, broad smiles on Bin and Jessa.

So I guess the moral of the story is: If your religious culture makes marriage the only way to get the things people naturally want (respect, freedom, your own apartment, kisses, movie dates), you're in even more danger than other people of getting married when you're quite young to somebody who'll soon sicken you on sight....and be stuck with them for the next 60-or-70-plus years. Is that about right? Jessa and Bin apparently don't get this because most of what they do today is praise their ridiculous religious culture to the skies and preach about it to a bunch of kids who are way too young to even know what they're talking about. I wonder what they blame their plight on. Or whether they even see it as a plight. I can kind of imagine Bin halfway realizing that his teenage horniness is what got him into this. But I wonder how Jessa accounts for being married to somebody she doesn't like and never did like and who now doesn't seem to like her much either.....or whether she just thinks that's normal and to be expected.

I agree that Jessa should have gone running. But I think Bin should have gone running, too! They weren't a suitable couple at all. But Bin was utterly ruled by teen lust, and both of them were ruled by their parents' stupid idea that they should get married as fast as possible to the first conservative Christian who appeared. It's interesting to me that Jessa seems to swallow or at least give a whole lot of lip service to a lot of the Gothard stuff. But temperamentally she's quite unsuited to swallowing Gothard's Rule Number One: All females exist to make all men feel like giants; and that's all females exist for. Yet they really did dupe her into betraying that aspect of herself by convincing her into the marriage. It was a bad time for her to put aside her strong will. Annoying as I find both Bin and Jessa I also do feel kind of bad for both of them as they look toward their likely long so-very-sick-of-each-other future. They didn't live in a situation where good guidance (needed by Bin) or permission and space to make your own choices (needed by Jessa) was available. Although I'd feel sorrier for them if they didn't insist on continually touting the glories of their upbringings.

He was born to be "the leader of the home," according to Gothard, a lot of other patriarchal leaders, and the Duggars..... Looks to me like JB and M were just super excited to have their firstborn be a boy and a boy who seemed pretty smart to them and good looking to them and who could sing (apparently. I don't know if I've ever heard the alleged "opera" singing...although maybe I've heard one little clip at some point.) And I think they even liked his arrogant attitude. They seem to have put him forward to their church, Gothard, and even government friends as being somebody who would grow to be a leader of the nation, not just of their home. And then of course they would have been able to bask in the reflected glory. Worked out a bit differently.

Absolutely. I don't think he's not attracted to children. Or that his cravings haven't'escalated over time. I just think that, given other things about his personality, and given the few things we've heard about his life as a whole, it's likely that his cravings have always gone beyond that.

Yeah. I agree. That sex-show-biz worker he hooked up with described him. And she didn't describe anything like a person who looked around for somebody who was underage or who could pass for it or somebody who practiced standard BDSM or something. She described somebody who didn't seem interested in sex so much as he was interested in just being cold and mean to somebody and treating her like she barely existed......Who, according to her description as I remember it, was only interested in just batting her around. That was apparently his thrill, what he was interested in paying for. And that's what he did in arguably one of the best times of his life -- a time when he had a high-paying job and his "work" was going out in front of microphones and telling people what to do. .... which he clearly had always liked doing. Something that fed his power cravings outside of mean sex. But he still wanted only meanness, even then.

Yep, hard for me to fathom, too. And thank goodness for Pope Francis.

Exactly. We can hope. He's spent a lifetime being protected from ever having to reflect on anything, or feel empathy or guilt or curb his arrogance, though. So it's gonna be an uphill climb for anybody who tries to rehab him at all, I expect.

Yep. Makes sense. I have to say that I doubt Josh is actually primarily attracted to children, though. I think he's attracted to sex as domination and power, period, and that he's mainly aroused by seeing that someone weaker than he is or someone representative of people or things he resents can be made to suffer.

I don't think Jinge is stupid. And I expect she cares about her kids' health and so on. But seems to me her religion has as one of its main tenets that your reason and so-called facts simply lead you astray when it comes to matters of faith. They're tools of the devil. And she just got herself baptized in her second-layer church, which is just as misogynistic -- albeit with a different dress code -- as the first. So I'd think she considers her duty as a Christian wife toward her husband to be a primary tenet of her faith. So .... she follows Jer's lead because she's a member of two cultish religions, both of which order her to do that. I think she may well know facts, but she probably just doesn't focus on them. She focuses on following the headship instead, because God never said "follow facts." He said "follow the headship." And since Jer's a windsock for opinions, following the headship's lead in Jingle's case means Masks On! No, Masks Off! No, Masks On!, No......etc. lather rinse repeat. Kinda similar to the various Jer-led enthusiasms she expresses and her "career" as a social-media person.....etc. Misogynistic Jesus has told her to drop her identity and her brain at the door. So she has.

Yeah, and I'm sure she really does believe that God commands her to stay.... And I think if you're heavily into that kind of religion, you probably hold onto the belief that for every bit you suffer in this life because you're following God's commands, you're going to get a higher, more exalted and more comfy throne in heaven. .... So in her mind staying is her shot at getting something really good. And she'll have that for eternity. Put that beside the prospect of a person who's never held a job and being married from a pretty young age suddenly being on her own with seven kids and losing her shot at the comfiest throne in heaven because she abandoned her headship..... Well, it's no contest, really, I expect. Plus now she has the Duggars helping out with the kids. If she left Josh, then there's some probability -- from small to huge -- that all or much of that help would evaporate. And she loves that alliance with the Duggars -- part of America's True Christian Royalty....It makes her feel super important, I think. Her only regret there is that she hasn't been able to be on television with them as much as she'd like. I don't know to what degree her smile on Monday was voluntary and to what degree it was a rictus grin that was in large part miserable but that she pasted on to imitate the inappropriate smiles of Josh and the lawyer, as she was no doubt told to do. .... But I do kind of think that she's been enamored of being part of the Royal Family for so long that there was probably at least a minuscule bit of her that was still proud of being out in public allied with a Duggar with the tv cameras on. I'm pretty sure she sees the tv-camera interest in the Duggs as only a testament to their greatness and how much God loves them and wants them to be America's role models. And she's part of that, and I'd bet it still makes her proud. I do wish I knew how much she knows about exactly what Josh looked at and sought out....or whether he's actually convinced her that he didn't do the crime. But I don't really think that, even if she did know the worst details, that it'd make a difference. I think she'd just go into some sort of trance of denial because losing her place in Duggardom is the worst fate she could imagine for herself, not just in this world but in her imaginary next. I can't imagine a scenario in which she has the slightest interest in leaving.

I need to take a moment. 😁

maybe it's not a mask but a feedbag....😁

Probably worsened by the faint voice of Mrs. Reber reverberating through the building frame with the prayer I'd guess she's now saying quietly day and night -- "Please don't let there be any postponements. Please don't let there be any postponements."

It's unfortunate that this provides no exculpatory evidence of the previous pictures just being those inevitable few bad screenshots in which people have highly inappropriate looks on their faces. These two -- and their visible lawyer -- have the same inappropriate looks on their faces in every frame. Kinda staggering, really.

I still wonder what she knows about what was in the files or whether he convinced her that he didn't even do this. If she knows he downloaded it, is idiot, thoughtless Anna thinking "sexy time" or does she realize that much of it is hideous torture? I expect the lawyer told them to look dignified and confident. Interesting that their interpretation of that is "insufferably smug." And flirty, in this case.

It's definitely getting local coverage. Stories about it came up on my youtube page a couple times today. I was busy with other stuff and didn't look at them, but the local news is definitely on the story. You could see in the stills that people were reporting from the courthouse.

David Waller's Wallers have a Matthew, one of their younger ones. So it could be him....But Matthew Waller isn't exactly an uncommon name, I'd say. So it could be some other guy, too. Whoever it is, nobody in the government side saw any evidence that he could have done the downloading .... even though Josh would like everybody to think he did. Looks like most people are going with "delusional" on the "what is it with Josh, anyway?" question. Makes sense.