Churchhoney

Oh, interesting thought. That's somebody who actually would have been inside the house -- and had an up-close view of the dirty laundry!

The thing is, it takes a lot of guts and, actually, actively used brains to leave. You have to have some conviction that your way is right for you and theirs is wrong, some confidence that you can take care of yourself and make a living on your own, and the courage to face a life that lacks both the material comforts you're used to and the only social milieu you've ever known at all. I don't think Josh is brave or strong, I'm sure he doesn't think and I highly doubt he's ever prepared himself in any way to stand fully on his own. And his parents certainly haven't prepared him for any of that either. He can be cocky as hell when he's spouting Duggar/Gothard/FRC groupthink hatred; he can be Mr. Bravado when he's "hosting" a stupid TLC special well inside the fortress Duggar -- and those are the things he's always gotten family and social-circle applause for. Otherwise, he's a weepy, clinging, lazy baby without a thought in his dim head, as far as I can see. It'll take something pretty major to dislodge him from the Duggar bosom, I expect. Not least because, once dislodged, where's he gonna go? Does he have any other social circle who will take him in? Is there an educational institution or an employment venue that he'd fit well into and likely be easily accepted by? I don't know what they would be. And neither does he. If he walks away, he's going to have to step, utterly unaided, into an indeterminate future. Without the requisite guts and brains, it'll take something explosive to push him into something that risky, I believe.

It's that damned Cliff Notes version again.

God gave us brains as a test of faith. If we use them, instead of relying on what God told King James to tell Bill Gothard to tell Jim Bob to tell Michelle to tell Jessa to tell us, then we are revealed as ungodly, unworthy, and most likely on the one-way off ramp headed straight to hell. Thankfully, no Duggar offspring have failed the test so far.

Oh, no. So much bad in one (all too possible) scenario. Boob still pushing the same stupid crap. Boob still running Josh's life as Josh gets older and older and older. Duggars still making money off their unearned celebrity. Josh still being a robot following the Duggar way. Duggars still influencing idiots to think that their way of life is great. Duggars still on television. Josh still on television. Worst of all -- maybe Boob still on television. Make it go away.

In the words of Tom Lehrer and "The Vatican Rag" -- Get in line in that processional, Step into that small confessional, There, the guy who's got religion'll Tell you if your sin's original. If it is, try playin' it safer, Drink the wine and chew the wafer, Two, four, six, eight, Time to transubstantiate!

Honestly, with the whole Duggar family, starting with Jim Bob and Michelle and moving down through Josh and the other kids (oh, heck, starting with Grandma, really, come to think of it), I have no idea what combination of factors lies behind their behavior. The roots of stuff they do must be some mix of "s/he actually believes in the 'principles' of her/his faith/ideology" "s/he's too childish, immature and weak to act on what s/he really believes -- or is questioning -- instead of what the Duggar tradition has been," and "s/he doesn't really believe anything but acts entirely out of various neuroses, other sick psychological tics and just plain rottenness." Every time I think one of these predominates with somebody, something else happens and I change my mind. For stupid, ignorant, shallow, ridiculous people, their behavior certainly is challenging to understand.

I don't think they'll ever feel like idiots. Their blame-everybody-else reflex is way too strong. We are the idiots. They are the godly people that Satan is determined to destroy.

On another note, I'd love to know what's going on in the head of Mike "Calvin-and-Hobbes" Seewald as he watches the rich and righteous Duggar family become apparently less rich and righteous by the day. Wonder if he's feeling any qualms about his hot quest to marry off his dim teenager to Jessa, potential mother of kids in the double digits, now that it's looking as if Jim Bob won't have the fame or bucks to help support Binjermin's coming brood or help him attain that lucrative teevee pastorship for leghumping millennials that he and Jessa have been dreaming of.

When someone is as controlling as Jim Bob (and maybe Michelle, too), there's no such thing as someone aging out of their purview and control. Control freaks don't raise children. They conceive and give birth to appendages and accessories, and that state is lifelong.

I do think this is quite true. But I also think that our sexuality is mostly way way way more fluid than we give it credit for, and that when people are in situations where one thing is available and another isn't, a pretty large number will find out that they can also have, act on and enjoy attractions that aren't the ones that they may be most strongly wired for. I expect this is what happens in a society where heterosexual sex-and-affection contact is unavailable or limited for whatever reasons while same-sex people are widely available for contact. Boarding-school romances and prison romances do usually involve attraction, sometimes very strong attraction, from at least one of the parties and often from both. And then people graduate or get parole and the large majority live heterosexual lives, while some have their strongest wiring for their own sex.

Well, also there's probably a heck of a penalty clause because the network wants to get more reality-tv loonies to film, and if people feared everything would be spilled by the camera crew they'd be less likely to sign up. ... And on the crew end, they want to keep working in video and audio -- and as life goes on, the amount of "reality" tv is swamping a lot of other tv. So they don't want reputations that keep them from working "reality" shows, since it might mean they would lose the livelihoods they've trained for, altogether.

Amen.

This group isn't just in Illinois, either. It appears to be in multiple states, although it's a little hard to tell. And they don't just claim that whatever it is they do works for addiction; they claim it works for a bunch of other things, too -- virtually anything you'd consider a problem, it looks like. Here are some more websites. They make an effort to get involved with state juvenile-justice and criminal-justice systems, for example (don't know how successfully). And they claim people "cured" of a ton of things, including sex addiction. (although at least on this first site that I looked at, in Ohio, their video testimonies about this seem to be busted. http://www.rustreetsboro.com/ http://www.reformu.com/ http://reformersrecovery.com/ You can see why Jim Bob would be attracted to this. They do it all. And they do it without any education, training, relevant experience (or IQ). Why, it's practically a miracle!

Me, too. I even believe the part where he tried to be aggressive and rough. The part I absolutely don't believe is where she says it's the scariest thing that ever happened to her. Please. That's pure embellishment, in my opinion. And a stupid embellishment at that, especially for someone who's lived on the seamy side of things. Not only is Josh a 200-pound weakling but he's a scared, blustering child who almost certainly could be easily intimidated by any woman who stood up for herself for half a minute. In the sex business, you're going to run across many many men with aggressive feelings toward women and who seek you out because they intend to act on them. Josh would have been far from the first. And there's no way that that hide-behind-daddy's-skirts, cry-when-he-leaves-momma 20-something wanna-be-lawyer lard-ass was the scariest she ever saw, by a long shot. She wants to sell newspapers, so she embroidered.

Woohoo! .... and I mean that even if they do get seen on the show -- seems likely it'll be only a glimpse, if anything, now .... So. woohoo!

I'm stuck on the image of Josh Duggar being perhaps the scariest sex-related encounter somebody working in porn and stripping ever had. He's changed a lot since he molested a bunch of girls in such a quiet - sly -- way that they didn't even know that it had happened, hasn't he? And, really, unless he actually is Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde or the Incredible Hulk, I doubt that he would be the scariest sex-related encounter I've ever had. And yet he's that for a woman who works in two-bit strip clubs? Doesn't add up, to me.

That's it, all right. JB and M want their godly army of little robots who feed their egos. I guess the only good news out of this is the fact that a crazy cult like this that preaches an end to all birth control simply isn't going to persist in any numbers beyond two or three generations because most human beings won't put up with it. So the harder the Gothardites push it, the more they're dooming their little club in the long run.

Exactly. Hard to imagine that this won't become more apparent as the kids' marriages progress. I doubt that it'll become apparent to JB and M, though.

Yeah, the no-sex-without-the-chance-of-a-baby thing that really skews this whole conversation, I think. Because except for Duggarlike people (and a few other very conservative subcultures, such as some conservative Catholics), the rest of us just simply don't think in these terms at all any more. It's hard for me to imagine what kinds of feelings any of us in the 21st century would have about sex if it meant just one baby after another, no matter what. There would be huge amounts of anxiety and a poisoning of a lot of male-female relationships and marriages connected to that, I think. So different is that mindset from the normal one today that it's next to impossible to keep fully in mind that that is the Duggar reality when we're thinking about them. ... It's now been part of poisoning one marriage, I think. What's it going to do to Jessa's and Jill's marriages in a few years, when the stress and cost of multiple babies really hits them? Or if they don't produce the expected babies, what will that do to their relationships with JB and M? Does it play a role, as many expect, in the non-married status of John David or Jana? .... It's always gotta be there in their minds. And yet it's so foreign to my consciousness and the consciousness of everybody I know, that I'm sure I don't give it enough weight when I think about the Duggarlings and their lives and choices.

Sorry. I didn't mean to imply they wouldn't pay landing fees. But there are often parking fees (which are completely separate from the various kinds of landing fees) if you stay for a certain length of time. So they most likely wouldn't have had to pay any of those, since they only stayed eight minutes --i.e., not even long enough to stop the plane; just long enough to come down, circle round to a drop-off point and head back out to a runway for takeoff. I'm sure they paid landing fees of some kind if the airport charges them (and most do, I think). I was just responding to the idea that they might as well have let John David stay until dawn. If he had, it almost certainly would have cost more money because parking fees would have been added. [This, from Gemma Violet, is what I was remarking on: "Not only did the trip to the facility take place in darkness (not the safest time to fly a small plane I would assume), but JD didn't even wait a few hours until daylight to take off for home. He could have hung around the airport for a few hours until dawn." ..... And I was talking about the "hung around the airport for a few hours" part. That triggers additional parking fees that are separate from and in addition to the various landing fees, which I'm sure they were already paying. It was just a comment on Jim Bob likely wanting to pay as little as possible. Not saying that they'd somehow avoided all fees. Sorry for the confusion.]

Or to avoid plane parking fees. Just sayin. This is Jim Bob, after all. And he's just lost his main source of income.

And yet with all this talk of being monitored by other people, there's basically no attention paid to the idea of helping anybody build true social networks, with real friends, communication, a sense of meaning. Even the Duggar siblings get split apart if they're of different sexes. And you're supposed to confess everything to your parents, but those confessions don't have anything to do with actual honesty, talking things out, working problems through, mutual sharing, people actually getting to know each other in a deep way. .... Your whole relationship with other people boils down to either you being somebody's cop or having them be your cop. Beyond that, they don't promote human relationships at all. When it seems pretty clear that it's real relationships and real communication and so on that actually help people, including when said people suffer from addictions. Instead they actually promote isolation. So stupid.

This is my favorite part. Especially since the answer is -- A wannabe and a never was? (and an idiot). Seriously.

I hope he is, too. I keep thinking of how he let me down with the cat incident. But when it comes to Josh, it seems as if little things may be adding up to indicate that he's on the right track with this one. Here's hopin'.