Blame Jim Bob and Michelle

The Duggars. Ugh. We’ve had almost 20 years of these quiverfull zealots. I had a family member who was obsessed with them. “Look how Michelle has those kids trained! How does she do it? They all play instruments and she teaches them.” And on and on and ON. It was nauseating.

You know, it’s ok if you want to live that way but on the lifestyle choices graph, the Duggar family is definitely an outlier. Consider their radical form of Baptist theology meant that their whole family was and still is tied to women as breeders in a strictly patriarchal purity culture on steroids. In fact, Michelle Duggar advised her daughters and daughters in law to never refuse sex with their husbands. And that means unprotected sex. While it looks like some of the Duggar girls have decided not to follow their parents’ rules, Anna Duggar, Josh Duggars’ long suffering wife appears to live by them. Josh was arrested in April on the receipt and possession of child pornography. He was found guilty of both charges today. And Anna Duggar gave birth to her seventh child in October.

Josh is looking at a minimum sentence of 5 years and possibly 20 years in jail. Those seven kids will grow up without their dad, which actually might be a good thing for the daughters. Anna Duggar won’t have a husband and her lifestyle choice didn’t prepare her for bearing the financial burden of raising a family of seven kids.

The number of victims of Josh’s child pornography lifestyle choice is staggering. I don’t even want to know what the images contain except that the prosecutors claim that some of them were the worst they’d ever seen and there were over 100 images or remnants of images recovered from his hard drive.

Josh has had a problem with sex on multiple occasions over the years. Im not surprised. The lifestyle choices his parents made put such a high price on normal sexual development that there was no natural outlet for Josh. He didn’t even kiss his wife until they were married and the video of that kiss looked like some kind of primitive ritual. The entire church was present when he was finally able to perform what should have been a private act. I remember thinking at the time that it was obscene, as if the whole congregation was going to later get off on Anna’s deflowering.

The preoccupation with chastity is at the heart of the turmoil over Roe v Wade as well. Women need to guard themselves. They need to save themselves for marriage. And then they must submit themselves to their husband’s demands and fulfill their divine natures as perpetual mothers and long suffering wives.

I feel sorry for Anna. Her choices were taken away from her at the age of 18 when her father handed her to her husband. They have a covenant marriage which makes divorce difficult if not impossible. She did her duty and answered her calling like so many other outlier Baptist sect followers and Mormons and Jehovahs Witnesses and nebby fundamentalist evangelicals and strict Catholics who want their fringe sexuality lifestyle choices acknowledged as the one true way with all of the child sexual abusers that these sects seem to create and protect.

These are the people who are deciding what your daughters can do with their bodies.