Churchhoney

Exactly. Furthermore, the scores are not even actually reported to anyone except the parents, and they are not recorded. The state removes all identifying information before using the scores in aggregate to maintain statistics on the average performance of homeschooled kids at each grade level. This seems shocking to the many, but actually it's pretty typical of the kinds of homeschool laws that HSLDA has been steadily promoting and seeing enacted over the past couple decades. Their reasoning is basically that test scores are a government-created standard and that when it comes to raising children only parent-created standards should be honored. When JimBob said what he did about parents not being mandatory reporters and having full discretion about how matters are handled in their own families, he was pretty much just parroting this thought, I'd say.

Hey, ho, the glamorous life!

Well, actually, if it had been up to the reality stars on this show and the reality show production company, crap would not have happened. It was only the outside world that forced them to acknowledge that crap happened. And they did not actually acknowledge it on the show. That being the case, I would call this more of an "unreality" show. And that might be fine. Except that these particular unreality stars spent a huge amount of time -- on the show and off -- saying both explicitly and implicitly that their way of life was likely the best prevention in the world for this exact kind of crap ever happening. Modesty and keeping your kids from watching television or surfing the net produce children who are much much less likely than other children to sin -- and, of course, they define sin almost entirely as a sexual thing. What that does is, it makes the show even more a piece of fiction than some other reality shows seem to be. And many people find a cognitive dissonance there. And, of course, an additional ick factor, given the particular sexual sins that were committed and the high and mighty attitude toward other people's sex lives that both the perpetrator and his parents have always taken. Those are the problems. Not whether anybody's forgiven by God. Whether they're forgiven by God or not is entirely between them and God and doesn't affect the way the story line strikes many people.

I'm always amazed at how urgent it seems to some people to get others to believe the exact same thing that they do -- or else the others are doomed to eternal torment. After all, this is the moving Force behind the whole universe they're talking about. Why are so many so sure that that Force would be so gosh darned petty? ... And as if one particular set of people constructing documents over hundreds or thousands of years could be absolutely dead certain that their little details are the perfectly and only correct ones.

This is just what i've wondered about. The Duggars are fond of saying that guys look to marry women like their mothers. But from now on, I think they'd better at least add to that -- "Except for Derick. And Ben."

No, she works for something called Treehouse Sales & Solutions. It's a business consultancy in which a small group of former Walmart and Sam's Club employees advise/assist firms, internationally, with something -- except I'm not sure what. Maybe they help firms get into the Walmart/Sam's Club supply chain? Maybe they help companies get into any retail supply chain? Or any large multinational retail supply chain? Maybe they help people hone retail strategies that work for customers who would be Walmart patrons? All of the above? Plus any other problems that beset businesses trying to prosper in retail supply chains? I don't understand enough about the retail business to know. Anyway, here are a few things about them. This, from http://www.zoominfo.com/s/#!search/profile/company?companyId=345980829&targetid=profile: "Company Description: TreeHouse Sales & Solutions, Inc. in Northwest Arkansas helps companies improve their business with retail. We provide retail consultation and representation for you to the Wal Mart and Sam's Club markets throughout the world." Other stuff -- https://www.facebook.com/pages/Treehouse-Sales-and-Solutions/133301553388090 http://treehss.com/ They have only a few employees at present. So maybe they need more. I would think if a company that small were hiring an accountant, though, they'd want to hire somebody who had experience with more aspects of accounting than Derick does. Being familiar with sales tax would seem useful for this business, but that wouldn't be the kind of accounting they need for their own business, and if he were on the consultancy end, I'm sure he would need familiarity with several different aspects of accounting. Isn't it usual for people to move among different accounting specialties to pick up the broader knowledge you'd need for something like that?

Well, Kelly would have mentioned Gothard if Fox's interest had been in imparting information. But... clearly not.

They're so fearful and lacking in empathy. If you give people like that a bully pulpit from which to urge others to pass laws and make rules for communities and families, you end up with the Inquisition. Doing what you can to remove them from their position of extraordinary influence seems to me to be a perfectly proportionate response to the dangers they pose. And that goes double for the Duggars who've convinced so many that they're "sweet" Christians who do what Jesus would do, spreading "love that multiplies." That's the very opposite of what they spread, it seems to me. If they looked like the Grand Inquisitor, they'd be less dangerous. But Michelle's baby voice and JimBob's good old boy persona make them even more dangerous because it makes people think that their beliefs -- whose more dicey elements they go to great lengths to hide on the show -- are benign.

Oh, yeah, right. He's president emeritus or something now.

Sorry if this has already been posted. I didn't see it, so here it is (perhaps again). Paul Petersen (who as a kid actor played Jeff on the Donna Reed show many many many many many years ago, and who, through his organization, A Minor Consideration, has been an angry voice for a long time about the problems of kids in the entertainment industry) has some Facebook posts on the Duggar situation and related matters. To wit, some excerpts: https://www.facebook.com/minorcon/posts/893526584044294 "This Society persists in believing that children participating in the media are a protected Class; that a portion of their income is protected, that their work hours are limited, and their education is provided by their employers. It’s just not true. ....Here’s the rub. In Arkansas where the Duggar Family is produced there are Laws on the books that might have prevented the filming of this highly suspect family. But the Laws were ignored and went unenforced to this day. ....Where are the work permits, because they’re required? What are the terms of employment and what official reviewed them? "...This is official neglect. If the minimal protections we imagine are extended to the most visible children in our culture had been present in the real Arkansas world then even a cursory background check of the Duggar family would have revealed the tawdry truth about this holier-than-thou example of reality television’s unceasing need to focus on the 'unusual, the freakish, the abnormal.' "Did we learn nothing from the deliberately fabricated broadcasts of “John & Kate + 8?” How many times do we have to witness the unraveling of a famous television family before we demand common-sense action? "...The First Amendment was not crafted to protect the parent and producers involved in collaborative products that utilize minors. A novelist, a painter, a sculptor or a pamphleteer is, as an individual, by definition protected in his or her right to free expression. Not so the parent who sells their off-spring into the maw of popular entertainment. Not so the people involved in the wide-spread dissemination of the culturally-biased portrayal of childhood. "...Children in reality television deserve more protections than their counterparts in professionally- produced entertainment product, and as we’ve proven beyond any reasonably doubt, professional children are deliberately, woefully, dangerously under-protected."

It really is quite the "reality" show when we can reasonably posit that people might actually quit their real jobs to be on it, isn't it? This kind of sums up the whole nutty enterprise to me.

Seems that way to me. It sounds as if they included the phrase meaning to say something about how God is always providentially leading those wonderful Duggars, but they accidentally wrote what they were really thinking but would never admit -- "Wow, thank goodness those Duggars volunteered to withdraw. We don't need to make their problems our problems!" Kind of a fundie Freudian slip.

I don't think it's actually necessary. This is certainly one likely background. But I'm pretty sure that another is just being a control freak and/or a lover of personal power who has little to no empathy, and you can be that without suffering any prior abuse. A non-empathetic person with a lot of repressed anger (which doesn't have to relate to any childhood abuse) is another possibility, I think. Even having a little shade of sexual sadism combined with a lack of empathy could do it, really, I expect. That there's an imperative for "child training" and "breaking the spirits/wills" of children is an old, old tradition, so non-empathetic people of many kinds could use their faux nostalgia for that more godly and law-abiding past to justify it for themselves, I'm pretty sure.

Agree. They can live however they want. What they can't do is continue to have a tv show that gives them a national platform and undue power to influence others while they're simultaneously trying to deprive other people of rights in a way that conflicts with the principles of our civil democracy as it's existed from its beginning. If they believe that you go to hell because you act on homosexual behaviors, then any Duggar who feels homosexual attraction is perfectly at liberty to squelch it and marry someone of the opposite sex. Because those desires are biological. So some Duggar might have them. And if a Duggar does have them, that Duggar has a perfect right to believe that they're sinful and to refuse to act on them. More power to that Duggar. He or she will be living according to Duggar religious beliefs. And there's nothing at all wrong with that. What the Duggars can't do, in the America that I believe we created, is seek laws depriving other people of civil rights because their biologies are different from what Duggar religion teaches is permissible. We can't put in laws that allow religious codes to deprive people of civil rights. They would object strenuously if someone tried to enforce principles of Shintoism or Islam or animism through U.S. civil laws. Perhaps to the Duggars' surprise, however, the same goes for the principles of their religion.They have a perfect right to live by their religious code. But no right at all to try to enforce that religious code on others. But they have done this. Repeatedly. So losing the national platform that gave them added power to push their unAmerican agenda of fighting against others' civil rights based on their religious beliefs is a just result, in my opinion.

In a word, No. Arkansas (like most states) has no requirements when it comes to schooling materials or curricula. The students must periodically take grade-level achievement tests. But the test scores are used only to inform the parents (so they can care ... or not), and then the deidentified scores for homeschool students at the different grade levels are analyzed by the state to produce statistics on the average achievement levels of the state's homeschooled students.

I love poetic justice..

Well, I'm sure they don't mean this, but it sounds like, "Whew, we really dodged a bullet on this one, folks. They canceled on their own," doesn't it? Not the best phrasing, I'm thinking. Edited because I use "sure" as much as Jill and Jessa use "like."

Maybe he's scouting it out as the location for a new Duggar used car lot. Those young grads will be needing cheap cars. JimBob's going to have a lot of sons coming up (and potentially sons-in-law; see: Bin) who'll need employment. He could be contemplating a fundie-friendly, ownership-limited-to-Duggar-boys used-vehicle franchise operation.

Gothard doesn't link himself to any Christian group in particular, as far as I know. My sense is that he's developed a lucrative little side-cult that he can sell to any poor schlubs at all who hope to rev up their Xtianity to protect them from all the ills that man is heir to. And since lots of us are fearful and want to control everything -- and have been especially in the shifting times of the 70s, 80s, 90s and the skeery coming of the millennium -- he's had a stream of takers from all over. Wouldn't want to limit the customer base.

Or they're just quite isolated. Controlling families isolate. That's pretty much the first and main thing they do. And this is a controlling family.

...or an all-chocolate-bunny restaurant.

Agreed. But "Jill and Jessa Cloaked in Shame"? Newley (gone too soon) could have made a great song out of that.

Yes, this is absolutely true. But I follow a few celebs and they all follow more than 20 people. They follow friends and people they've worked with, charities they're interested in, a few news sites or Twitter jokesters and so on. It's a small number compared with those following them, of course, but they're still following somebody. For one thing, most like getting something in their Twitter feeds too, I think -- and they like forwarding stuff that people they know are sending out. This is why the Duggar number seems paltry to me -- if you follow so few and they're all family, you're really not picking up anything you didn't already know, and you don't seem to be interested in passing things on and curating the knowledge and ideas that come your way. It suggests that you aren't interested in a friend caring about some charity and sending along a message about it, for example. And that's really what Twitter and Instagram are about for most people, I think, including many celebrities.

Michelle can star in this one: On a Clear Day You Can Seewald Forever 'Jessa, 22, added that the exposure was a "re-victimization."' Shouldn't that be "re-non-victimization"?

"The Roar of the Tater Tots, The Smell of the Howlers"