Churchhoney

I'm not angry with them, but I also seriously doubt that they have actually "handled" any of this to any extent at all. In my own life, I was taught, urged, coerced to minimize and "move on from" and excuse quite a number of things that I realized -- much much much later -- were very bad things to minimize. And I learned that, no, I hadn't actually "handled them" and "moved on." All I'd done was shove them into the back of my mind -- where they sat around poisoning me and my relationships, giving me quite false underlying feelings and ideas about how people ordinarily behave and how they should treat each other, creating a ton of misdirected anger and self-doubt and so on, until I finally figured out what was going on. And, yes, I know that my experience may not be their experience. But I also know that they have been raised by and still have many if not most of their actions and beliefs directed by two of the most toxic minimizers and deniers around. And I know that what they said in the Fox interview essentially parrots what the two Big Minimizers had said a few days before. So I am quite angry at JB and M for forcing on these girls their own very warped and minimizing interpretation of events -- events that did not happen to them but to the girls -- for the selfish purpose of getting political power and tv money and public adulation based on their "wonderful, godly family" image. And who this spring were using their girls' supposedly wonderful easy "handling" of these events for the purposes of redeeming their image and that of their number one son and of saving their tv fame and cash. If Jessa and Jill hadn't been raised in a tyrannical way by two utterly selfish people who perpetually treat all their kids as means to their own ends rather than as individuals with their own thoughts and feelings and their own individual ways of dealing with things, I'd be a lot more likely to believe that J and J's protestations represent their own working through of the abuse. As it is, I expect that they've just been puppets on a string following JB and M's instructions about what to feel and think. And who knows? That may work for them. But I don't think it works for most people, so even though I don't blame them for what they said, I still think that the example they provide is a dangerous one (at least when it isn't accompanied by other examples of people for whom "forgiving and moving on quickly" ultimately didn't work out so well.) It's one thing to move on quickly. It's quite another thing to move on quickly because you've been ordered to do so, in my opinion.

Yeah. Depressing. Poor kid. On another note, girls are always barefoot or nearly so. And boys are always wearing shoes. Impossible for me not to read stuff in to that.

Part of me sees this as likely, but another part thinks that it couldn't possibly work this way. I don't see how Jessa and Jill could really tell any form of the truth about what happened without completely alienating Boob and setting up a completely messed-up premise for any show that he'd helm. And if they did do it, it would require messing with the family dynamics in ways that I really don't think J and J are willing or able to do. For one thing, I see Jessa as very much a double-downer on every statement she makes. I can't really see her having any attitude but this one -- I told you that this was no big deal and thus it is no big deal in any way, shape or form, you heathens. Plus, I think the backlash against TLC would be horrible if they did this, particularly from the survivor groups and so on but also among the many who have wanted them off the air and are now super pleased that they are. I think a lot of people would see this kind of two-faced return as a stab in the back. With RAINN in the mix for the documentary, if TLC actually used that program to launch an additional platform for the basically still molestation-denying Duggars, the outcry would be huge, it seems to me, and sponsors would run again since a lot a lot a lot of women would be part of the backlash. I would think TLC would anticipate this backlash and really not do this. ... Which is not to say that they aren't mulling a "Duggar Brides and Grooms" show down the line, say next year when J and J are both pregnant with their seconds and (Josiah and) Marjorie is pregnant with their first, or something. But I would think they'd have the sense to try to unhook any such show from the molestation issues as much as they could, so having it as a quick follow-on to the molestation special would be out, seems to me.

I'm glad that Josiah and Marjorie can now decide what to do with their lives without the pressure of television. Who knows? Maybe while the current chaos engulfs JB and M, these two can find some space to interact normally and actually learn what each of them wants and what kind of relationship -- or non-relationship -- they actually want. That's my dream, anyway. I hate seeing them pushed into courting-with-intention-to-marry-on-tv-in-the-next-season at their age and with their potentially spunky personalities.

This is exactly what they need to learn, though. As long as they have TLC money building their house, buying their Uggs and American Girl dolls and financing their trips abroad, the Duggar kids have no way to know that a) they are uneducated yokels and b) that uneducated yokels tend not to do well. And yet -- at some point the show was going to go off the air. And they were going to have to make it on their own, because Jim Bob could not and probably would not support the multitude that his hey-hey-heying is unleashing on the planet. The sooner the kids find out that their status actually is a problem when it comes to paying the bills, the sooner they can do something about it, in my opinion.

Well, what they really need is to get training, education and jobs. Like everybody else. Because the show was not going to last forever, even if all this hadn't happened. At some point, it was going to be canceled -- seemingly out of the blue, probably, since that's the way almost all cancellations happen -- because ratings were slipping, and that would have put the exact same requirement on this mega family: Take the needed steps to support yourselves and live life as something other than "celebrities," famous for being famous.

Well, staying on the air or going off the air -- both would cause the kids to suffer in some ways. But, by the same token, both have upsides for the kids and, in my opinion, going off the air has the bigger upside, although it may also cause the most short-term pain. Living your child/teenage/young-adult life on camera isn't good for anybody, as far as I'm concerned. It teaches those kids that life is all false, that behaving falsely is a virtue, that they're way more important in the world than they actually are, that they bear responsibility for supporting the family and have to portray the right family image if they're to fulfill that responsibility, that their father's and mother's morals and ethics are very important and widely admired, that they must never ever try to escape because it'll ruin the family brand. Etc. All untrue and damaging crap that kids shouldn't be taught to believe. Going off the air means losing money and watching Jim Bob and Michelle have some tantrums. That's not great. But I'm sure they've seen plenty of parental tantrums before -- including while the show's been on the air. And if they have to live the financial life of an average working family in America, well, welcome to how the other 90 percent live, Duggars.

To match the head inside.

Or a joke about Ben having married into a entire tribe of zombies without realizing it. Sort of like a caterpillar being immobilized and wrapped in spider silk, for when the spider family gets hungry in the lean season.

Grandma's mold house?

Well, plenty of people learn only what they're looking for. Sometimes even when it's the opposite of what's being taught. I even find it hard to tell whether I do that myself sometimes. : ) I'd kind of expect Ben to take this route -- even as he would imagine that he were taking the other. He's not really the brightest bulb. And not open-minded or with any humility at all about what he already knows and doesn't know. He truly believes that he's already been given the entire knowledge blueprint needed for life, I expect. With education filling in just the technical details and providing credentials.

Well, that's good. She can help them out when the show finally gets canceled. And while Josh looks for another job.

Ah, Cake Doctor and professional liar. Just like the rest of them.

Yep, you're right, and I even knew that. That just shows you the further pernicious effects of Duggardom. I forget everything I read because it's overwhelmed by the Duggar interpretation. I do wonder whether a large proportion of ATI people put the focus in the same places that the Duggars do. The sex stuff is simplistic and appeals to egos so much. I wonder whether Jim Bob and TLC are the only ones to focus on it or whether that's more widespread.

Plus, most -- but not all -- priests also give counsel on lots of other sins and other realms of human activity. Gothard and the Duggars, by contrast, seem to have built virtually their whole theology/philosophy around proper sexual behavior and proper sexual and gender roles. And if that's not enough to tell you how neurotic it all is and how much it arises entirely from their warped psychologies and not from the divine, I don't know what is. Their god made the universe, in all its complexity, but, by darn, he really doesn't care about anything except masturbation and the sin of wearing scoop-necked dresses. Right.

Well, if she were using midwives of the kind she saw in DC then they would use exactly the same indications as any other medical professional. I have kept hoping that, since her move came so late in the pregnancy, she would have gotten a referral from those folks to someone they knew with similar training and experience in her area. But I suppose that didn't happen. So if she's seeing one of the more Duggar-friendly-type midwives, then who knows? Some will follow medical-type indications very closely and others, it seems, will wing it.

Awful. I hope they grew out of it, too. So hard to see why people believe this stuff and want to teach children to believe it. I suppose it makes them feel secure? In any case, you certainly found yourself in a hotbed of terror-based, terrorizing religiosity. Wow. Also, I'm glad I never needed the rally. Hurrah for public school.

Okay, you're my hero. In some households, though, kids are likely to think it's far too dangerous to carry on the revolt openly, and I think the Duggars may be this kind. Mine was, so I had my revolution internally, and that does seem like cowardice many times, even to me. But in my household it looked way too likely that someone could trip a kid on the basement stairs so that her death from a cracked head on the cement seemed like a tragic accident about which some people would cry but not mean it. I got suicidal at 8, with repressing everything I thought a big cause of it, I suppose. But it wasn't really depression, just steeped fury, so I managed to think my way out of it, mostly, plotting the escape I could make some years down the line after I had a high school diploma and a little money from working as many jobs as I could get. If I had been a Duggar, without the possibility of that diploma or those jobs, I don't know what I would have done.

I came to that conclusion in the exact same way when I was 6. I didn't tell anyone, though. Thought it was too risky. Instead, I went on a binge of religious reading that lasted about five years, trying to figure out where my thinking might be going wrong. I looked like the biggest churchy child prig ever, and nobody knew there was a six-year-old atheist behind it all.

Prints. Printed fabric is of the devil. (that's something we wouldn't have known if it weren't for Bill Gothard.) This is either why Jessa was so impressed with Chester the Molester's "sly" abilities, or how we know that the statement about all the girls being asleep was pure hogwash.

I saw an episode of Pit Bulls and Parolees the other day, on which somebody said: Scared dogs are the most dangerous. Just like scared people. Out of Jim Bob's fear have risen many dangers.

They could be doing this. Or maybe Walmart offered Derick a good COBRA deal (not unheard of as a severance benefit), or they could just be buying insurance on the exchange. If Jill wasn't actually earning her own money from the show and it was going into the family kitty instead, they wouldn't be getting a huge income this year -- what with the mission idea, the end of the Walmart job and the likely dry-up of People covers -- so it's even remotely possible that they'd qualify for a small subsidy. The self-pay thing works okay if you never have a really big medical problem, but some people who do encounter really massive bills have found themselves on the hook for huge amounts. And in many cases the percentage that hospitals and doctors (etc.) will supposedly "knock off" your bill is a percentage off their very highest tier of prices, the ones they charge to individual payers, which are virtually always miles higher than what they charge to people with group insurance, employer groups and so on.

Exactly. When we're all busy letting Josh (and by extension his crappy parents) off the hook because now there's a lawsuit looming and so on, we're ignoring the -- what? dozen years? -- that have gone by in the interim when it appears that Josh (and his crappy parents) did absolutely nothing responsibility, repentance, repair, reparations or anything else suggestive of trying to actually address or help the situation or take any responsibility for it. It's all very well to say, Well now I can't do anything -- because lawyers. But did he/they ever do anything? And as for his "public repentance," well, in fact, the girls got as much or maybe even more angst and punishment out of that than he did, since they had to stand up in public and forgive the arrogant little bastard whether they wanted to or not and whether or not they even understood what the whole thing meant. So what's his example to his children, that we're all so worried about? If you do something rotten, sweep it under the rug as hard as possible and one day not only will the statute of limitations run out, but everyone will understand why, legally, you just can't address the issue, because there's a lawsuit. How moral. How spiritual. How Christian. I agree. Except that I've always thought that he probably didn't write the letter. Given how many people in the Duggars' world knew all about this, I sort of suspect that FRC drafted out that letter the day Josh was hired so that if the fewmets ever hit the fan, they could pull it out, edit it to get the details of the current events right and force a quick, clean resignation that was as much on their terms as possible. This isn't their first rodeo when it comes to sex scandals. Of course we'll never know. If he did write the letter, then there's a lot more excuse for him than I currently believe. And I do admit that I'm quite biased against Josh because I've seen so little of the show that I never saw his early performances until after this news broke. Having seen him in the 2004 special just after reading all of this stuff, his demeanor absolutely stunned me, especially coming from a teenage boy, and I have seen him ever since as somebody who wouldn't know repentance or responsibility if they came up and bit off his dick.

Yeah, I think it was that -- plus Jim Bob's concern for, first, his political career and later, when that was belly up, his -- and Josh's -- budding careers as teevee stars. Which to me makes it even more hellworthy.

Anything that's attractive to the eye but isn't on the "countenance." .... That include prints, bright colors, embroidery, etc. A long print skirt or a modestly constructed print blouse is generally verboten, as I understand it, because humans are drawn to look at interesting and colorful prints. So if you look at that long print skirt or the printed fabric of a shirt -- you'll be looking at "that" area of the woman's body! Her legs and her ass and her baby-fountains and her lady parts are under there! .... Among his other neuroses, Gothard seems to harbor the suspicion that anything humans are attracted to is bad and the attraction comes from Satan -- so pattern and design and decoration are kind of out, generally. ...