Churchhoney

Absolutely. Because in their view a woman really has no right to any agency of her own. That's how low a woman is. You might keep one daughter unmarried so she can take care of her parents as they age.......But she's lower than nothing, basically. She's nobody. That comes out in various little ways -- Like the married daughters going out to dinner together with their husbands and the adult unmarried daughter not ever attending such social events. Little reminders that she's nothing compared to the married. And if this view of women doesn't prove that this whole pile of patriarchal religions and traditions have been carefully created over the years to put and keep men in all the power positions and hand them the keys to everything, I don't know what does.

That's why I say JB's a control freak. He took everything in the Gothard playbook about the patriarch being the head of everything, and he took it to the limit, clearly figuring out ways to keep all the boys on the string forever. However, I think there's a ton of evidence that Gothard himself always spoke out of both sides of his mouth on the "raise young men to be leaders" point. .... Because Gothard -- and the rest of them -- deliberately took JB and M as the ideal image for the cult. So no matter what they might have been saying out of one side of their mouths about young men being raised to be leaders, they were putting a family where that absolutely didn't happen at all -- and was never intended to happen -- up in front of people as the ideal family. And Gothard himself never said anything about young men being "independent:" leaders. Anybody who wanted people with independent leadership capacity wouldn't declare that nobody should go to college or get any education except from their mother at the dining room table, and that they should all "learn" entirely by spouting the formulations that Gothard and his friends wrote down in the wisdom books. Rote learning was the whole program. So they were supposed to be robot leaders -- looking good and being forceful about pushing the stuff the cult said. But what they were supposed to be pushing was the stuff that Gothard and the old farts had already announced were the right things. The definition of "leader" had nothing about independence in it. Same thing for the idea about the young man going out to be a headship and supporting his wife. Gothard said that. But he also specified again and again that nobody in the cult was supposed to work for anybody who wasn't in the cult, and, ideally, they should all work only for people in their own nuclear families. In other words, just what Jim Bob's got -- If your Gothardite father starts a business, you're supposed to work in it because that's the only way you can keep clear of working for somebody who's a danger to you because they're not followers of the right Jesus. And guess who's the boss in most such family businesses? The patriarch, not the sons. And I've never seen a Gothard preaching about the old guy stepping aside so the sons can take over. .... He may have assumed that the father would still groom the kids to be the executives some day, but if that's an assumption, I've never seen it be a stated one........Jim Bob certainly does seem to fail in helping his sons prepare to assume his position in the future -- but I've read tons of stuff about their cult and I've never read anything that actually tells the current patriarch that that's part of his job. I;d guess that that's mainly because Gothard's whole program is entirely self-serving. And he certainly never wanted to step aside from his own leadership in favor of somebody younger. To me it seem to me that Gothard himself definitely failed to create something that could give rise to actual young leaders. He's the one who insisted on young men working only in the family business and being educated only minimally and entirely as rote learners. Questioning and innovating are utterly discouraged by his whole system. To me, that says that his system doesn't give rise to real leadership. It can't because it's completely based on restrictions, and not any freedom or any actual knowledge -- just parroting the "wisdom" of Gothard and his old buddies. He's the one who says that people in their 20s can't make any personal decisions or pursue education or have any friends outside the family. That's not a recipe for leaders. When Gothard says "leaders," with reference to the young, seems pretty clear to me that all he means is "People who'll push my program on others." He certainly doesn't mean "people who'll come up with new good ideas." He doesn't believe in new ideas. And while Gothard talked about creating the world's leaders, the way he sold his program to parents was preaching control control control. I will teach you to control your kids so they'll never even think of doing anything outside of your rules. He preached on and on about how neither kids or young people or women should be alone with friend groups because they might listen to somebody who isn't their parent. That's not what anybody would say who was actually trying to produce leaders in the sense you mean, it seems to me. He means "leader" in the very limited sense of somebody who looks neat, can march, and loudly spout the predetermined party line. That's no leader. Jim Bob's following the program. And he's proving that the program doesn't create leaders. But I think that's at least as much because the Gothard program has nothing to do with leadership as it does with Jim Bob's own behavior! It's more like Scientology methods applied to conservative Christians And Scientology doesn't produce leaders either. It just produces brainwashed nuts. Ans Scientology too has always pretended that its goal is to produce leaders who'll straighten out the whole world. But when you look at what it really does and intends, the only goal its methods can achieve is making people into robots and parrots.

No kidding. Wow, Sure doesn't encourage even the smallest degree of independence, does it?! Yeesh.

Yeah, I'd bet that's true of pretty much the whole audience. That's the way they were sold......Only later did it start leaking out that that's not the way they apparently actied!

Their cult preaches and preaches and preaches and preaches and preaches that your offspring should never act independently of their fathers even into the far reaches of adulthood.......So what I want to know is, Could it be an accident that you're a longtime devotee to this cult -- a leader of this cult, a repeated speaker at cult events, an "author" of parenting books that were largely written by people from this cult-- and yet actually be a person who wants to raise independent children? Here's the kind of thing the cult the Duggars led -- and want to lead again, clearly -- prescribes and that they clearly continue to prescribe for their own family. Would anyone who had any interest at all in raising independent people approve of something like this, preach something like this, and promote something like this?! I can't imagine it! You'd have to really stumble in a highly misguided way, seems to me! 'He went through the courtship process when he was 21. 'In ATI, dating was forbidden, and even having a crush or admitting to liking someone was against the rules. “I spent most of my teen years trying to repress my very normal attraction to women,” he said. “I referred to it in my journals as a ‘monster,’ some sort of evil thing that I had to destroy or else it would destroy me. I knew that I wasn’t allowed to be in love until I had my parents’ permission, and I wasn’t allowed to tell a girl that I was interested in her until I had her parents’ permission and was prepared to marry her.” 'In ATI circles, young people don’t date, they “court,” which means dating with the intention to get married. For Micah, he got his parents’ permission to court a girl when he was 21. He followed all the necessary rules, got the girl’s parents’ permission and even waited until his wedding day to have his first kiss. But the marriage didn’t last. “As it turns out, the whole framework of courtship isn’t a great foundation for a healthy relationship,” he said. “We were divorced before our sixth anniversary.” '“It was a terrible place to be a 19-year-old.” 'After graduating from high school, Micah enthusiastically joined an ATI training center, working at several locations throughout the country. “At first I really liked the training centers because I got to be around other people a lot and felt a sense of purpose and belonging,” he said. “But as time went on, I felt the walls closing in and my soul being suffocated.” The longer he stayed there, he started to fall into a deep depression as he felt exhausted by the environment and the strict rules. He had a 9 p.m. curfew, wasn’t allowed to wear jeans or T-shirts, couldn’t speak to anyone of the opposite sex and had to do mandatory fasting on Sundays. “The culture there was one of non-stop religious performance — always trying to do more for God and be more perfect,” he said. “It was a terrible place to be a 19-year-old.” 'While there, he also witnessed things he would later realize were totally inappropriate. “None of us knew at the time about the allegations of sexual impropriety by Bill Gothard that would be forthcoming, but we saw the girls who he picked out as his favorites,” he said. “We all knew he had a type, and we knew that he gave extra attention to those girls — promising them special roles in his various programs and outreaches.” 'After being at the centers for two years, he started feeling jaded about ATI. “During my time there, I saw up close that it was a system of extreme authoritarianism, and I began to question the fundamentalist approach to Christianity that was pervasive everywhere I went,” he said. “I started to feel the cognitive dissonance between what we were taught and what Jesus had said.” Etc.! https://www.intouchweekly.com/posts/duggars-religion-151762/

Yep. Unadorned, really. I don't think the Duggs were eager to advertise that -- as they pretend they can be role models for the mainstream. But.....they were perfectly willing to do it, seems like.

And of course he didn't just get caught with his pants down. He got caught grooming and trapping a young teenager who was part of his organization/church and who then worked in his household, helping out with his multiple kids. And what he got caught doing was basically using her as a masturbation toy against her will night after night after night. So -- you know, essentially another SA thing that many would call pedophilia, since it started when she was 15 or so......Just a different version of Gothard, who also messed with young teens (although he also messed with women who weren't teens)..... This whole culture is mainly a bunch of men who've found a constitutionally protected way to use everybody in their purview for whatever personal purposes they have. Thank goodness for the young woman who called out creep Doug and brought this particular train to a stop.

It's my strong belief -- based on a bunch of stuff I found on a semi-hidden part of her family's website about "biblical betrothal," what I've read about that from others who practice it, and what we saw of pre-engagement events, and what we heard in their wedding vows and Jed!'s engagement statements -- that Jed! and Katey never courted. I believe that instead of courting, they agreed to simply enter a binding engagement -- called a biblical betrothal -- based on an arrangement made entirely by their two fathers, and not based on any prior acquaintance or attraction between the members of the couple. So, as I understand it, Jed! and Katey likely met only a few times before becoming engaged, and they never spent any time at all without the direct presence of their parents, not even doing something like sitting on the porch swing with a mother and an aunt at the open window right behind, as you see in 19th-century stories. Among other things, this would account for what I think most people have read as pretty extreme awkwardness in the engagement video. And "biblical betrothal" is clearly something of which Katey's father, Kory Nakatsu, is a strong proponent. He appears terrified that a decision about a relationship made by a young person will expose that young person to intense danger. So he jumped aboard a trend train in which the entire choice of a young person's mate is up to the parents, and the young people simply aren't given any time or leeway to change their minds.

And yet for years media outlets of many kinds, a bunch of church-y organizations, commercial enterprises and state and local governments portrayed them and honored them as some sort of ideal parents. And I don't think they looked like ideal parents at all, even based on what was shown, without even considering all the stuff they hid and/or lied about, a substantial chunk of which predated their national media career entirely.

I vaguely recall the dinner as being part of this big night that included their initially? going into the cold candlelit sort of barn -- and that's where he got down on one knee and actually proposed -- and then a series of followup events, including the business dinner in some sort of winterized tent?-- with a valentine card next to her -- and an after-walk outdoors,, which included the marshmallow toasting and fireworks, on that outdoor bench.... Don't know if my memory's conflating a couple of events. But in my mind, all that stuff was in the one video and it all happened on one night, with the actual knee-down proposal and her not very convincing shocked act and their very awkward first hug coming first, in the seemingly unheated and uninsulated barnish building, before anything was eaten or any fireworks went off.

Well, I'd bet that to some degree JB is probably cratering a bit under the current situation and that Meeechelle also is experiencing tremors. Maybe that's part of why she never showed up at court -- they weren't sure she could cope with this -- And that the tremors aren't just about anybody's son but about somebody who's a lynchpin of their cult/sect/family myth. Just seems to me that post-law-enforcement doubling down on paranoia and attempts to revivify their beliefs and influence (such as the Branson crusade and so on) could be signs that JB's been very occupied for the past couple years in finding ways to reassert the truth of their myths in the face of this problem....

This is the way the story looks to me, based on what I've read in Gothard texts and read/heard from believing and apostate cult/sect members-- You know all that reading aloud from Genesis that the Seewalds do? Well, Gothard, and by extension JB and M, have focused on Genesis too. And Gothard gave the patriarchs who paid his salary the idea that what God promised Abraham in Genesis God was now promising to IBLP conservative U.S. Christian men in this generation -- "And I will make thy seed to multiply as the stars of heaven, and will give unto thy seed all these countries; and in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed" Gen. 26:4. In the Gothard version this only happens and the offspring will only carry this blessing if they're kept in lockstep and fully under the patriarch's umbrella, for life. (and the promise of this is why a bunch of misguided insecure dunderheads paid his salary) The prospect of being Abraham in the Genesis story is a huge ego boost for some insecure, fearful, greedy-to-have-more-power-than-they-fear-they-do people, apparently. And JB and M are clearly among those who've craved that ego boost and who've gone all the way with believing in it. (and their ability to produce 19 surviving offspring has further fed their egos and convinced them that this scheme they've accepted is, indeed, God's plan, especially for them, since God sealed the deal with the sign of ultra-fertility he placed on them -- numerous as the stars, 200 grandbabies, etc -- and the way God set them up as the ideal for other Christians to model themselves on, including on television) Hence, the family business compound stealth prison complete with snowboarding vacations and private planes they've constructed to make sure the male Duggarlings stay under the umbrella as long as the patriarch lives. (Females who marry get their husband's umbrella over them, so those young wives actually end up under their fathers-in-law's umbrellas, if the fathers-in-law are patriarch sorts, because their sons are supposed to stay under their fathers' umbrellas for life, too. Your patriarchy privileges -- mainly being viewed as the be-all and end-all of your entire -- huge -- family's existence -- last until death. And your wife gets to bask in your reflected glory -- that's why she's always gazing up into your face from down below.) And this story, the Genesis story being true still in our time, is the big story in JB's and M's imaginations. So any other considerations about whether this setup might somehow cripple the sons or whatever is absolutely irrelevant and an idea you'd brush away as if it were a fly. It's nothing. It's a satanic temporal temptation devised to get you to ignore the big picture: that God intends you to people the Earth with your blessed offspring. I'm not even kidding. I think it's nearly a sure bet that, if pressed, JB and M would produce some garbly version of this tale as the first principle they hold somewhere down in their tiny minds.

Moody Bible Institute, Bachelor's Degree in Ministry Leadership, with a concentration in Preaching, 2020 And he did study at least some of what they taught him. Because as far as I've heard, on the whole he's a much better preacher than Jeremy, at this point.

nvm hit the wrong icon, as I so often do....

I'd say that's because it's a "faith" whose details were created primarily by a bunch of guys who want to claim they have God's approval for insisting on rules that mean that, in their closed world and in the afterlife they imagine they deserve, most everything will work out in their favor -- and not in anybody else's favor. In other words, it's a "faith" they created entirely for their own purposes, basing it loosely on some scriptures they cherrypicked. And they didn't create it in good faith, either. They created it 100 percent to serve their own utterly selfish ends. Although I'm sure most have lied to themselves the whole time about their motivations.

Smuggar & OfSmuggar: A Series Of Horrible Things They Do 100-Percent On Purpose

I guess Bin didn't learn from his first social-media fiasco years ago that the written word addressed to the general public is not his friend. I think the trouble is that they all truly believe they're part of a small, very special group of people that God has specially blessed and enlightened and charged with setting the rest of the world right through their "ministries" and "missions." When all they really are is a bubble full of arrogant, ill-informed fools. And they never even have a chance of figuring out the truth as long as they stay in the bubble. But they believe it's God's bubble, protecting them from hell, so they won't even look outside it. With TLC giving them a huge media platform -- which Bin, Der and Jer all climbed aboard because they were longing for media platforms -- and now social media offering a loudspeaker to anybody who already has some fame and wants to expand it, they're going to keep trying to impress everyone with God's real message for the foreseeable future, I suppose.

Since I think you're right about this being the worst thing they can do, I for one strongly encourage all Duggars and Duggar adjacents to start doing things of this kind immediately. Day and night. On all channels. Repeatedly doubling down. Intervening in each other's pissing contests, a la Bin, and thereby starting new pissing contests. C'mon, Duggars! You can do it! You can become the most despised family in America!! I'm counting on you! 😁

This is the same kind of thing that got Jessa to knock Bin (and herself) off social media the first time. 😁

Absolutely. But...unfortunately, about a million times easier said than done!

Well, we're all really talking about attitudes toward the daughters that Duggar haters have, right? Because the responses are completely different when you're talking about leghumpers and Duggar fans, rabid or not. The fans have the opposite response to the people who are here. Among fans, by numbers and comments and so on, I'd say Jessa's the definite favorite. She has by far the most social media fans and they praise her highly for everything she does. But since virtually none of the haters actually know the Duggars, I think all the commentary on the individual daughters is just based on the long-running fantasy among haters to see somebody -- anbody! -- in the family veer from the JB/M/Gothard party line, at least a little bit. And at this point, by outward signs, Jill's the most separate and distinct from JB and M. I'm pretty sure that's at the heart of virtually all the Jill praise I see.......She has a kid in public school and she's known to be at odds with her parents, whom everybody hates. It doesn't even matter that -- when it comes to deliberate differentiation from the clan -- they seem to have separated from her way more than she separated from them -- it's her apparent slight distance from the sources of the Evils of Duggardom -- no matter who most contributed to the split -- that make people think more kindly of her these days, I think. Before the split, I didn't get the sense that Jill was particularly popular with the Duggar-hater population at all.....In some ways she was regarded as the worst daughter, when it came to discussing her midwife stuff, her missionary stuff and so on. She was the family's self-righteous snitch, unattractive, grifty, stupid. ...After the split, it's all different! Seems to me it's the exact same thing that made Jinger the haters' fantasy girl for a long time. She made a slightly annoyed face on the tv show sometimes, and suddenly she was revered as the Duggar who completely disagreed with the rest of them and itched to escape and live a very different life -- Free Jinger! And Jana has managed to look slightly differentiated from her parents simply by hardly ever saying anything at all, one way or another. I don't believe for a minute that this is a Jana strategy or that she;s much, or at all, differentiated from JB and M. But we generally don't see her actually talking the party line, and that absence of talk has been enough for people to unconsciously decide she's not as bad as her parents. Jessa, by contrast, has often posted long videos praising her parents and all their beliefs and practices to the skies......Haters are all going to hate that and identify her closely with the parents that everybody hates. .... Most of the time, when people praise or criticize a Duggar daughter, it's not the individual we're really praising or criticizing, I think. It's mainly about how closely we see them allied with Jim Bob and Michelle, in general. (even though we don't often realize that that's the basis of the criticism) I'd bet that if Jessa had never recorded those half-hour-long paeans to JB and M being the greatest people on Earth and if her husband had been known to hold a recent paying job where the pay didn't come directly from Jim Bob, she'd be viewed differently by hater world..... "It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt," as they say.

I think the road the kid was allegedly on is a road that perpendicularly intersects the road the Duggar compound fronts on. It's about a thousand feet from both the TTH and the warehouse...... The warehouse is about four hundred feet from the TTH. The TTH is that far back from the road their property fronts on, and the warehouse is essentially right on that front road. I wonder how the kid got on the perpendicular road. You'd either have to cross through other people's yards -- some of them with wooded areas -- or go to the road in front of the Duggar property and walk down it to the intersecting road. No sidewalks, of course. This is rural. That suggests to me that it was more likely one of the slightly older kids who was out wandering, not a child under age two, although it's obviously not impossible for an under-two-year-old. Thinking about the question of risk and endangerment....Not only are there several ponds within the same walking distance from the Duggars' TTH-and-warehouse, but if a child headed the other direction, they could just as easily get to the massive dump/landfill that's on the other side of the road the Duggars front on. It's about the same distance from the Duggar house as the road the kid was allegedly found on, just in a different direction........ I don't know how well fenced the dump is, but it's certainly within easy walking distance of their house.

The parade, you mean? ....Yep, Jim Bob and Michelle rode on a float in a local Christmas parade over Thanksgiving weekend., which was the weekend before the trial began. Some of the younger generations were with them. They had a little granddaughter with them, maybe John David and Abbie's little girl, Gracie, but I'm not sure. In the picture she wasn't smiling, and I recognize Gracie by her smile (and none of the other granddaughters in her age group at all!). .... Jed! and Katey were on the float, too. Don't know if there was anyone else. JB and M were smiling as if they didn't have a care in the world, but I'd guess a lot of the people on the sidewalk knew that they did.....and were surprised.

I'm sure he was. I remember back when the marriage train got going, people would wonder whether all the prospective grooms and brides knew what they were getting into with the Duggs' beliefs. But obviously we've since learned that everybody who marries in agrees with them completely and often is equally rabid about it, if somewhat less loud about their rabidness The Duggar adjacents all seem to have made a beeline for the family because of their shared ideas.

she was smiling broadly on the float on Thanksgiving weekend. That was the weekend right before JB impersonated the judge. She may have been drugged, but in the photo I saw she looked fairly alert. She was sitting down in that picture but she was being trusted to hold one of the grandbabies.