Churchhoney

I think that the patriarch of Onan's line decreed that the child would be treated for legal and inheritance purposes as the dead brother's heir -- and thus grandpa patriarch's primary heir -- rather than as a child of Onan, who I think may have felt that he should now inherit since his brother was daid. Basically, gramps called patriarch's privilege and decreed that the kid would displace Onan in the inheritance list, looks like. Kinda like Queen E waking up this morning to decree that, yeah, she's gonna bypass Charles, abdicate today and hand the throne to William. Or Charlotte. heh It's good to be Queen. Or patriarch.

And they couldn't follow the lead of some folks I know who've expanded mowing businesses into general yard and garden care. Because they're lazy, ignorant idiots who'd kill all your plants.

I think this was a cheap cellphone pic. I enlarged it as much as I could but the diploma text just kept getting fuzzier and fuzzier. Not enough pixels to read it, it seems.

Unfortunately, I think it's quite possible for groups who don't think of the woman as a full person who will be conscious throughout the proceedings and might have the capacity or desire to enjoy it on her own terms. This whole setup is obviously created by people who've never even considered that a possibility. In their view, the woman's only there as a receptacle into which the man can deposit his wonder-sperm to get relief and potentially -- each and every time! -- make a baby for which she can be another receptacle. In their view, the man or boy can use the woman as an orgasm-production box; she'll have no negative responses to it because women have no sexual feelings, good or bad; and she'll be happy with her "service" because he's her headship. Plenty of things in their lives show the astonishing misogyny of the Gothard, Duggar, and related cults. But nothing more than this hideous courtship and marriage setup, in my opinion.

I'm not sure that living in The House of Spies you're ever at ease, in front of a tv camera or not. Having grown up in a house of spies myself, I can say that I was never ever at ease. And, decades later, I'm still very very seldom fully at ease, no matter what's going on. And people can tell. They can see it. So it's possible that it's not a tv thing but just that they may have their alert signals set on high at all times. Makes you stiff, awkward, stilted, etc. No matter what.

But while a cat who's once sat on a hot stove lid will never sit on a hot stove again (or a cold one either -- says Mr. Twain), will Jessa bite into a casserole just out of a 400 degree oven again? You betcha. She's probably done it already. I'm sure this is an FU Internetz video plus an audition for a new job, but it sure does nothing to counteract the view that Duggars are terminally lazy, kinda stupid and ignorant on purpose.

"Hope springs eternal in the human breast; Man never is, but always To be blest." (Alexander Pope, persecuted Catholic, chronically ill great poet who knew a bit about hope in an apparently hopeless situation...) At this point, I'd bet we're mostly hoping rather than expecting really. Having once been in a similar boat to the Duggar spawn, I doubt I'll ever stop hoping. Said spawns' apparent cluelessness and dearth of gumption make hoping uphill work, though.

Ditto.

Homeschooling law in Arkansas allows those requirements to be anything at all that the family declares them to be. So ... I'm guessing you have to make one tater tot casserole that nobody dies from eating, dust out the inside of one car and recite the Proverb of your choice without messing up more than half the words.

Uh-oh. That sort of suggests to me that he doesn't really know what he's getting into. Although I can't imagine how he wouldn't. ... Maybe he's like Bin -- so obsessed with the idea that the Duggar connection will build his "ministry" into something spectacular that he's been blind to what their lives are really like? I don't really see that. But he does look comparatively relaxed in that picture. Odd.

It certainly could be a factor. I kind of think JB himself is the main factor, though!

To be fair, it can be hard to tell whether somebody's tried get work dirt off of them or not. I just finished a day of housepainting, for example. I took a shower and used Lava soap and a nail brush. And there are still areas of paint on me that I haven't been able to get off. And let's not talk about my fingernails.

Even though there are a heckuva lot of northern European fundies and they might make up a large majority, I think there are probably fundies from literally every ethinic background. I know of Italian, Indian, Chinese, Somalian and Russian Jewish fundies, for example. It seems kinda odd in many of these cases, but I guess personality types and experiences-that-push-you-toward certain religious ideas transcend ethnic lines pretty completely -- and often trump cultural traditions from your past.

Jana: Bullet Dodger or Miserable Old Maid?

Sure did. Really gave me the creeps.

I only watched a few seconds so I don't know what he uses. But most people use the story in Genesis about Onan -- a guy whose father told him to conceive children with his dead brother's widow, with whom he'd become a couple as was, I guess, a custom. If he had, those kids would have been his father's heirs. But he apparently pulled out a lot instead, so they had no children, and that left him being his father's heir. God cursed Onan for his behavior, and that's been interpreted by many over the years to mean that God frowns on "spilling seed." (Personally, seems more likely to me that God wanted him to obey his father or to not be a greedy jerk about the inheritance, but, hey, I'm not a sex-obsessed Christian, so what do I know?) Anyway, quite a long time ago, I believe, the word "onanism" came to be used mainly for masturbation rather than for its original deliberate seed-spilling reference, which was to coitus interruptus. And God curses it! ETA: Okay, day late, dollar short. ..........I'm kind of amazed that everybody has the same explanation here. Such a fuss has long been made about masturbation, you'd think that there'd be dozens of texts condemning it explicitly, rather than one text that doesn't even condemn it at all -- and may not even condemn its cousin, CI. Some people are really really really spooked by anything that shows we have a physical nature and might enjoy that, aren't they?

You mean read? Take the advice of someone who's -- shudder -- edumacated? Take time to -- double shudder -- learn something? Start on the bottom rung instead of presenting herself as an instant expert? .... Nope. JB and M have taught her much better than that.

He's so busy in his "ministry" teaching others to self-loathe for various reasons that I keep wondering what it was that triggered big-time self-loathing in him. Seems as if you'd have to feel that yourself to be so committed to pushing it on others. I suppose it could be some sort of delayed reactive guilt over having left his family's apparent way to become a party boy for some years. ... Or else he's just really really really pissed off that his athletic career didn't go the way he'd hoped, so he's decided to take it out on everybody. ... Of course, just because he's ostensibly signing up for life married to a Duggar doesn't necessarily mean that he's actually committed to walking the narrow fundie way himself once he gets established, I suppose. He could be Joshley 2.0, inwardly plotting (consciously or un-) to walk on the wild side while talking the fundie line to a gullible congregation, since that's a grift he knows how to do because of his family background. (And it provides much more of an ego boost than the entry-level jobs he could get with what appears to be a general business degree. Using that, he'd have to work his way into a position of power and ego strokes. As a "pastor," he gets those right away.) I think the Duggar-in-laws might contribute a new collective noun to the language. You've got a pride of lions and a murder of crows. And in Bin, Der and Jer, you've got a mockery of ministers.

Could've been, but I think I recall that it was that northwest Arkansas guy who got bad publicity recently for sticking pamphlets about the the evil of gayness inpeople's doors -- and maybe enlisting some young kids to spread his message? Can't remember his name, but I think it was him. They've been seen hanging around with him quite a lot over the past year or so, especially some of the howlers -- more pictures of him than of Jeremy, I suppose because they were keeping Jer on the downlow. I think that guy's married, perhaps?

Well, let's keep hoping.

That's not a recipe. It's a crime against nature.

Yes, by all means get sex and relationship counseling from someone who helped facilitate Gothard's sick and evil activities with vulnerable teenagers. And Nathan loves Ashley "as she is" and doesn't want her "to change" but thinks maybe God doesn't want them to get married? I guess that makes Nathan an apostate who believes that God supports compatibility between married couples. Pretty un-Christian there, Nathan. The Real God wants you to marry someone you don't get along with as a way of spreading peace on Earth. Or something. What was that again, Bin?

The tragedy of this is that the Duggars will universally believe that this is because he tried to have an affair with a sex worker, not because he engaged in intra-family molestation of children and after his parents swept that under the rug and hushed up the girls, they all thought it was great for him to bound around the country condemning other people's sexual makeups and behavior.

Okay, I'm the contrarian in F, M, K. I'd f Bin because he's young enough so that he'd be open to my teaching him to do it right (as opposed to how I suspect Jeremy's been doing it -- i.e., following his own bent entirely and, since athletes tend to get away with this, not paying attention to whether the woman has a bent at all, if you get my drift.). I'd m Derick because he brings breakfast in bed, seems to be pretty good with his child, doesn't seem to be overbearing about getting his own way, and is capable of getting gainful steady employment outside the house. And I'd k Jeremy, because I don't trust a guy who ranks "meek" as a top character trait for a woman.

Yes, and he also spends an hour or two each day convincing insecure Catholics that good deeds done in the name of Jesus are, in fact, "filthy." .... Add to that his traveling roadshow for convincing preteen and teenage boys that masturbation is a quick one-way ticket to hell and I'd say his career consists of boosting America's self-loathing quotient through the roof, especially among the vulnerable. How nice.