Okay, I'll ask... what about Josh Duggar?

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I think this post is important:

http://paper-bird.net/2015/05/23/the-du ... he-police/

Basically, our society is far too retributive. There's a graph showing how much higher juvenile incarceration is in this country compared to other developed countries. (It's several times higher.)

IMO the most important thing is to find out what really happened, what's happening now and to get the family appropriate counseling if there are problems. The Duggars cannot be trusted to be objective here. The only thing we have is their word so they are going to try to make it look as harmless as possible because they worry about their reputation but that's not going to get them help if they need it.

The one I wonder about the most is Jana Duggar. She's second oldest to Josh and she's not in the show that often. I wonder if there's more here than meets the eye? Notice she did not appear with Jessa and Jill in Josh's defense? She is the one I wonder who experienced the worst of it. And then Josh goes and marries a girl named Anna, sounds almost like Jana.

Ana,

Not sure. IMO, the family's interview with Fox News should not have touched on this matter. They're just continuing to drag this matter before the public eye.

Come to think of it, they should not have even created the reality show. Then again, I rarely if ever watch reality shows and don't see the point of them.

They might be hoping for future shows because they get paid this is why they continue to appear on television in interviews. From their point of view, they offer family friendly, wholesome, Christian entertainment and they feel they are one of the few and there's a market for it so they want to continue on even though it seems like they are exploiting themselves and people wonder why they want to be on television so bad when Michelle and Jim Bob said they do not allow their children to watch television. I've always marveled at this fact about them. It's obvious they want to be on television so badly but, supposedly, the kids aren't even allowed to watch or own a t.v. This has always kinda made me laugh. I've wondered, so why are you all always on my t.v.? Then they had an episode that explained they see television as a tool for themselves to bring quality into people's lives or something like that, so it's alright for them to be on it. Typical self righteous excuse why it's okay for them and not others.
I only watched 19 Kids And Counting right around the time Josie was born. The rest of the time, I only watched when nothing else was on but I do not watch it religiously, heh. The older girls, except for Jana, are on practically every episode I watched. I was under the impression Jana didn't even live with the family (because she was hardly ever on any episodes) but I read recently she still does.

You gotta love the right wing christian nutjobs. Perhaps they should do the right thing and get counselling for their daughters rather than wasting time attacking gay people.

AMEN!! !! !

I vehemently disagree with the Duggars' (and all of conservative Christianity's, for that matter) stance on most of the issues. The anti-gay thing, for example-- I find it fearful, unloving, ungodly, and basically downright Satanic. Holy mackerel-- even if you're certain they're going to burn in Hell for their lifestyle, they're human beings entitled to common decency and to equal treatment under the law.

I profoundly despise the "inright, outright, upright, downright happy all the time" doctrine. It's sick and evil and other than conveniently allowing people to avoid even thinking about those nasty scary negative emotions, it blows absolutely no one any good whatsoever. I've seen it over and over and over again, even tried to live it, and it's utterly crazy-making. Sad, mad, tired, and scared happen. Deal with it.

The doctrine of perfect submission is sick, and very stressful for both men and women. The teaching that men's "urges" are practically uncontrollable and it's all up to women to prevent that, stacked with the submission doctrine, is a breeding ground for rape. Period.

My best friend growing up attended a Gothardite church. Don't get me started. He's a sick, perverted, manipulative control freak. God does not demand a perm, and that's all I've got to say about that. I somehow imagine that Gothard is going to burn in Hell for taking the Name of the Lord in vain.

I gag on the perfect-family image. NOBODY is that perfect, and we're not supposed to be. We're supposed to get up in the morning, do our jobs, have compassion for others when they fail, try to be decent, and admit when we screw up and try again. That's pretty much the life of Jesus in a nutshell. JUST TELL THE TRUTH, DAMMIT!! I'll still respect you, still like you, still watch your show.

But, a lot of those things are societal problems, not Duggarite problems. We as a society are guilty of worshipping a hollow image. We're guilty of idolizing the appearance of perfection. We're guilty of despising those who are not like us (homophobia, at the end of the day, is just a specific subset of xenophobia). We as a culture want to cover up and dispense with sadness, fear, anger, uncertainty, stressed-out, overwhelmed, and every other emotion that isn't 'pretty.'

Don't even get me started on the extent to which we DO NOT want to even imagine each others' pathologies.

Actually, I did watch the Duggars quite a lot. I liked to watch them because sometimes the imperfect would show through, and I knew there was more imperfect underneath, and that generally made me feel better about myself in a culture that is decidedly guilty of saying mothers must be perfect in everything we do with our kids or else we're FAILING.

With that said... I get really sick of listening to people condemn them for having so many kids. It's BS. I don't want to live in a society where only what the majority deems to be the "right" number is allowed, or where you must have what the majority deems to be the "right" ideology. Think about how that would work out for us, eh??? [sarcasm] That should be difficult to imagine! [/sarcasm]

I've seen large families that worked well, and small families that were utterly dysfunctional, and everything in between. I've seen mainline Christians with two kids have sexual abuse between those kids, and handle it a lot worse (DENIAL-- their extent of dealing with it was to pretend it wasn't happening and beat the tar out of the daughter for lying and wetting the bed, and nobody got any help until a cousin ended up in therapy as an adult after having suffered the same molestation from the perp).

And yes, I CAN understand why people would choose to cover it up when admitting it consigns one child to the prison system, puts the other children on the witness stand, oftentimes causes the other children to be removed from the home on the presumption that this sort of thing ONLY happens to unfit parents, and opens the family up to permanent judgment and permanent supervision by the state. That doesn't make covering it up right, but it does make it understandable.

I know a lady who had five second-trimester miscarriages before managing to carry two pregnancies to term. She had an undiagnosed thyroid condition. Hell, my MIL lost three before managing to carry one to term.

I had pre-eclampsia (precursor to fullblown toxemia) with my first pregnancy (and I was 23 years old and uninsured and paid for the whole thing OOP). The next two were normal and uncomplicated. Then we lost one at ~10 weeks' gestation due to, as far as I can tell, gross medical malpractice (probable colon obstruction was ignored because I presented at the ER sick, exhausted, distressed, and wearing pajama pants and a t-shirt; baby died of fecal poisoning). The last one was normal and uncomplicated. These things happen. A LOT. And nobody talks about it, except in the doctor's office or on Internet support boards for other people going through the same thing, because of the aforementioned Happy Shiny Perfect Myth.

First off, I have big problems with the LGBT lifestyle. But what bugs me about the so-called Evangelical Christian movement is the intolerance of those congregations. Have they not heard, "Hate the sin, Love the sinner?" Then again, what do I know?

As for large families, I ought to know: my paternal grandmother has 18 brothers and sisters. Dad had 3 older sisters and 2 younger brothers. I have 3 younger brothers and a sister (long deceased). However, they were born in the first third of the 20th century, and were raised on a farm. You needed all the cheap (as in free) help you could get in those days in order to make the farm work. Also, during that era, medicine had not advanced as far as it has today. A lot of the time, children died in childbirth or early infancy.

Nowadays, a family that has that many children have a father that has problems keeping his schvance in his pants. I just wonder if families, like the Duggars, (whom I never really watched), have issues with inbreeding, like a lot of Amish families in Lancaster County, PA are currently experiencing?

BuyerBeware-

I am very sorry to read about your history of miscarriages. I'm glad you have a child today.
Just out of interest, as your best friend is such a terrible, manipulative person, why is he your best friend?

I have a little bit of a hard time placing the same level of criminality on a 14 year old than I would an adult. The question is did he really stop for good? If so, I suppose he deserves a second chance. I find it a little disgusting how the sisters are essentially forced into a situation where they are obligated to defend him on live tv in front of the entire world. Let's be real - he is a family member and they aren't going to throw him under the bus especially if he has changed.

Eh, I only had one. My MIL and a girl I was friends with in my 20s had the nightmare experiences.

Gothard is the horrible human being. I should have been clearer. Google him. My friend was a decent girl caught in a bad situation. It's sort of hard to argue with the Gothard doctrine when you're all of 11 years old and female to boot.

And-- YES, it is still wrong...

...but I have the same hard time placing the same level of criminality on a 14-year-old diddling his sister (or being too aggressive with his fingers and his girlfriend's pants, hence my swearing that I WILL chaperone my kids' dates up to age 18) as I do on, say, a 30-year-old going after a 5-year-old.

I don't place the same level of criminality on that as I do on coercive or violent rape, either. I have not been coercively or violently raped; however, my mother and grandmother were. They seemed to be much more upset by it, for a much longer period of time, than I was over any of the incidents of non-consensual fingering that I experienced from a peer as a young teen.

Both are wrong. Both need to be stopped and dealt with, with help and punishment for the perp and help and empathy for the victim. But they are not equally evil, equally reprehensible, or equally traumatic IMO.

Of course, I had a guy get aggressive with his fingers and don't feel particularly traumatized. I was not, however, molested as a child by an adult to have that serve as a viable basis for comparison, so the statement about "equally traumatic" is by definition based in ignorance.

I think it has less to do with the specific sexual act and more to do with the feelings that it conjures up. Does it make the person feel ashamed? Uncomfortable? Afraid? I think these questions are more important to ask than what specific act was done by such and such a person of such and such an age, etc, etc.

It's a little difficult to quantify the severity of sexual abuse.

I was bored and did some digging on this case because things like things interest me in a weird way. Apparently Josh was outed in 2007 on an anonymous forum. I won't specifically link it since I think it's rather poor taste. However, I can say with fair confidence that it's probably a good thing this show is being canceled for the good of everyone involved.