Churchhoney

So that happened. Marjorie signs an actual book contract for a devotional book as both writer and illustrator. Imagine such a teenager actually married into Jizm Bob's control. And the land of Duggar homeschooling, designed by MeChelle. Nope. On the other hand, I woulda been happy had she managed to pull Josiah out of it. But I'm afraid the Duggar gravity is too strong.

I agree. Somehow I don't see him doing it, though. For some reason he reads as essentially a weakling and a coward to me. I hope he proves that a wrong impression. It'd be better for him and for everybody else if he just walked away from all of them, I think. Anna'll never leave him otherwise, I expect.

And I wonder whether the worst thing is that they don't even realize that getting an education and a job and having some power to improve your own life are possibilities. All they hear is that schools and jobs in which you work for and with non-family-members are the earthly equivalent of hell and that people are incapable of doing anything at all without Jesus and anybody who tries or imagines that they can is utterly evil and doomed. Their imaginations have been so circumscribed that they probably don't even realize what they might be in despair about. It's hard to imagine what's going to become of these kids. Their deprivation seems even worse than that of most of the other families we know about.

Hey, David Waller grasped that he was lost in possibly irredeemable sin at age 3. Jinger fell into depression over her black soul at age 6. Four and a half is right in the ball park for these unfortunate children. Apparently something to do with having these lunatics for parents.

And of course this raises the question why people who really really want (at least) 19 kids -- supplemented around the house with as many "grandbabies" as possible -- would deliberately buy a house that many would feel wasn't a good place for said kids to play outdoors. Oh, I remember. These world-famous child-loving people don't really give a flying crap about the actual needs and wants of children! At all! In the least! Why would kids need to play outside? And who cares if they drink and bathe in landfill water? Cause Jesus!

She could if she actually cared about telling him. But actually, she just wants to tell us.

I think respect is a big key to the Duggs' whole problem. While the Duggar kids have been, in some ways, held up to the world as being oh-so-special-ecial-and-better-than-anyone-by-virtue-of-being-JimBob's-kids,-Gothard's-devotees-and-Jesus's-chief-cheerleaders, none of them has been shown one iota of real and meaningful respect by their parents, ever. At all. And they've been carefully taught not to respect each other, given the way everybody's supposed to endlessly tattle and follow each other around because none of them alone has any "accountability." All that being the case -- and since they've never spent any time with anyone who does practice respect for others, since they hang out almost exclusively with Gothard followers, when they do get to leave the house -- I think it's likely that no Duggar kid has the slightest idea what respect actually is. They don't even know it exists, let alone that it's good to treat others respectfully. All their "role models" have endlessly modeled this no-respect paradigm for them. So I guess it's no surprise that their idea of human contact is confined to ignoring people's reality while trying to shove Duggarism down their throats.

I can understand that. Playing outside where you can see all that open sky, land, roads... It might give you the idea you could leave.

Yes, except that there really is no story here. All that Raw Story does is quote Hollywood Gossip's (as far as I know, unsubstantiated) claim that the new show might have been facing cancellation before the end of its first season (whenever that was -- the preseason? this just-concluded season? say what?) and then muse that the talk of babies seems suspicious in some way because of that. That's not a story of any kind. It's a guess, or an insinuation, spurred by an unclear rumor "reported" -- or made up, or heard in the convo of two teenagers on the street -- by clickbait factory/absolutely-not-a-journalism-outlet Hollywood Gossip. And the Raw Story conjecture makes a conspiracy theory about hints and ulterior motives out of the fact that two Duggar females talked about getting pregnant soon. Which could be valid. But on the other hand, what else do Duggar females ever talk about? It's the kind of thing that makes me wonder why Raw Story has a rep as legit, really.

I expect that they mostly sit and stare into space or walk around very slowly, with their jaws hanging slack. That's why they need all that Starbucks. If they didn't pump caffeine they'd fall over from lack of brain activity. I have some relatives like this. They talk, but only to a point. Like, they name a topic ..."Saw Jerry the other day..." and then they just trail off, don't say anything more about it. And their fellow conversers accept this as a complete statement.

I'm torn. I don't believe he's happy living in the Kingdom of God aka Jim Bob. He certainly doesn't want umpty-ump children, as Anna and, I assume, JB and M want for him. So I can see a meltdown. On the other hand, selling used cars in rural Arkansas really is his level, in terms of his skill set, cultural background and so on. He doesn't have to spend every day worried that somebody'll call him out as a professional/intellectual fraud, as I expect he worried every day in DC. And he has to know that it's a heckuva lot easier to hold a job supplied by Jism Bob than it is to leave the family compound and seek and land a job from somebody else. And Josh and the Duggars generally are about nothing if they're not about "law of least effort." So while I can see him freaking out over the religion/"morals" aspect, I can also see him contenting himself with the situation based on the employment/paycheck aspect.

Oh, I basically agree. As far as my personal view goes, I see it the same way you do. But that's because I don't believe that any religious group can know for sure if it has the corner on truth, so people's individual beliefs have to be given some respect. However, I also think that it's hard to push that judgment onto other people who have different premises -- you can only go back to square one and try to argue against their premises, which is a whole other thing. If somebody truly believes that humans are screwed for eternity if they don't embrace the Baptist Jesus, then obviously the very best thing to do -- and in fact the necessary and kind thing to do -- is to proselytize in any way possible. If that's your premise, then it would be uncaring and disrespectful not to think people should go wherever they can go as missionaries. And dishonesty in the service of what somebody sees as a higher good is generally considered acceptable (although not necessarily the best choice) by most of us, I think. My main point, though, is that we can't blame it on Derick individually. He acted not only based on a premise I expect he strongly holds -- that you gotta be a Baptist-type-Protestant to have a happy eternal life -- but under the auspices of an institution that many many people hold in very high regard

Thanks. I actually didn't grow up fundie, though. I grew up with insane nasty people.....And the reason I'm so drawn to the whole fundie thing is because of the tremendous similarities I've noticed between this brand of "Christian" and insane nasty people! ; ) And I, too, wonder whether there aren't a bunch of sociologists studying the heck out of the Duggar and other of these clans. And, if not, why the heck not?

The Baptist missionary board (as well as some others) encourages a lot of people-with-a-missionary-ambition to go to countries beyond the number they are allowed to have in as official missionaries. They advise these people -- students, tourists, business people -- on how to get into universities, even help them get jobs that are set up by Baptist in-country liaisons (they have an official name for this post) and then they give them instruction, encouragement and opportunities to also function as informal missionaries among the population -- meeting and hanging out with locals and talking to them about the wonderful world of being baptists. They do this both to get around the limits that most every country places on the number of missionaries they'll allow in and to save money, since these people essentially pay their own way. Derick was one of these. He worked for a trekking company and studied language, and then spent the rest of his time hanging out with his Nepalese coworkers, fellow students and neighbors, talking to them about becoming conservative Protestant Christians. This is standard practice -- albeit a practice somewhat kept-on-the-quiet to avoid national governments picking up on it and trying to crack down -- with the Baptist missionary board and others. So it's only scandalous if you consider the missionary board's activities in this vein scandalous. It's not some nefarious thing that Derick did on his own. It's all described on the missionary board website (although a tad bit cryptically, for the reasons I mentioned above). A lot of people accuse Derick of being a liar for the way he portrays his time in Nepal, but the people who participate are clearly encouraged to do so quietly, both before and after their adventures, for the reasons I mentioned above.

Jill is Michelle's kid, all right. Food surfaces, schmood surfaces. We'll run and plunk our butts where we like.

This is something that Jill said for the same reason the Rodriguez children say that both public and Christian schools are seething hotbeds of constant deadly sin. Her parents told her that this was true and she's a little robot -- albeit, now, a young adult robot -- who parrots and believes every damned thing JB and M tell her. They're rotten idiots, but they've still been able to successfully program a houseful of people to believe that they're both infallible and fabulous. I get how they did that. What I don't get though, I must say, is how they also seem to have programmed the leghumpers to believe it. Wishful thinking and gullibility are strong strong forces, I guess.

I know some people who went to Liberty and who consider themselves conservative evangelicals rather than fundamentalists. The differences they point to are that they're not as isolationist as fundies or as legalistically judgmental when it comes to total inerrancy-to-the-letter and such. I expect there may be a fair number of Liberty grads who would put themselves in that category, actually.

Control freaks can't afford outside contact for their controlees. I went to public school and still was deprived of human contact as much as my family could possibly manage. The old standby approach is to make you so leery of speaking to other people that you don't have contact with others even when you do, you know, have contact. Jill seems to do that part by instilling fear of and disdain for others. In my case, they did it by convincing me that I was far below a pile of fresh crap on the list of desirable things and that nobody in the world would want to do anything but vomit if I spoke to them or approached them in any way. It's all about the isolation, and it's kind of amazing to me that even the biggest idiots -- and all those in denial about their control freakism, as I expect the Rod parents are -- instantly grasp this fact. The fact that those kids are kept on the road all the time is obviously a part of this. And it's an especially horrible part, I think, because it greatly limits the chances that a kid will ever feel comfortable or brave enough about another person or situation to let down their guard a little to reach out at all or begin to notice that devil-mommy may have been wrong.

Well, as I said, she mentioned "Christian" schools. I would imagine that the Rodrigui don't include Catholic schools in that. However, she made clear that Christian schools -- by which I expect she means Protestant schools, many of which are conservative, Baptist, evangelical -- are also hotbeds of heathens. Perhaps not as heathenish as Catholics (or Episcopalians, or Lutheran or UCC or another liberal Prot denom). But certainly devilish enough. As you say, Jesuit education is considered excellent by us open-minded sorts. So it's obviously satanic.

Nurie (I think -- one of the older girls, anyway) mentioned specifically that Christian schools are almost as bad as public schools, so they can't go to them either. Wonder if the malnutrition helps them keep the kids from developing functional brains of their own.

Glad to see Olivia's staying angry. Hold tight to that anger, kid. Anger can be your friend and your savior. And in your horrible situation, maybe the only one you'll ever have available.

Mass escape of more allegedly homeschooled but mainly just home-imprisoned kids. Not surprising that faux homeschooling greatly appeals to maniacal control freaks, but what a tragedy that it has to be up to kids to escape mostly on their own. Kudos to this group for managing to do it. Wish they could inspire the Rodrigui to this kind of action, although I wonder whether Jill and dummy don't keep them on the road so much partly to squash escape plans because the kids seldom know any neighbors or other locals where they happen to be, don't know where things are so wouldn't know where to run to, and so on. https://homeschoolersanonymous.org/2016/05/10/oregon-refuge-children-hid-the-guns-before-running/ "Last Friday, as soon as their mother climbed in the shower, five Sharp children bolted down the driveway of their Auburn, Kan., home. Before they left, according to testimony in a Wednesday hearing, they took the guns out of a cubbyhole in the house and stashed them at the end of the drive. Then they got a ride from a neighbor to the Shawnee County sheriff’s office in Topeka. And on Wednesday — three months after making headlines when they performed for armed occupiers who had taken over a wildlife refuge in Oregon — the children were taken into state custody because of abuse allegations."

Sweet merciful crap. Those poor destroyed children. Their parents oughta be locked up for the wanton murder of souls. I can't imagine what will ever become of those poor young things. They're like the kids in the Golden Compass after Mrs. Coulter separated them from their daemons. They're even physically like that, utterly malnourished. Horrifying.

In that podcast interview with the young woman from a Gothard family that was going around several months ago, she said that her family wasn't able even to go to more than a handful of the Gothard conferences -- let alone travel around the world spreading the Word. And they actually seemed to be fairly average people with jobs and so on, and a respect for education, even for girls. I think she said that that was why ATI ultimately developed a lot of "conferences on video" and such -- so that the many people who couldn't do all that traveling could develop little Gothard groups in their areas with families in the cult getting together periodically just watching the videos and so on. Makes me wonder whether it's not just a tiny handful of these people who somehow go gallivanting all around, while the ones who practice more normal home economy don't see that as a budget item worthy of swallowing up many other things in life (or worth grifting for).

I still sew on the floor sometimes.