Let me give my two cents about the second most famous family in America, the Duggars. I’m giving first place to the Kardashians because for some reason America needs to know every detail Kardashian, even to whether this dress or that dress makes Kim’s butt look big. Couldn’t we all agree that Kim has a big butt, and it looks big in every dress she tries on, and just move on?
Anyway, we’re here to talk about the number two family, the Duggars. In case you’ve been living in a cave, or Alabama, the Duggars are the Arkansas family that can’t take Nancy Reagan’s advice and just say “no”. They’ve got nineteen kids, all with surnames that begin with “J”, and as the show says, they’re still counting.
I’m reminded of the one liner attributed to Groucho Marx on “You Bet Your Life”, when Groucho was interviewing a lady who had six or seven kids. Groucho supposedly said something like, “I love my cigar but I take it out of my mouth every now and then”. All kidding aside, there are so many Duggar issues that fly in the face of reason, logic, humanity and just general health that it’s hard to pin down one to focus on. Fortunately, the eldest son Josh has provided us a jumping off point.
In case you’ve missed the show and all of the national headlines, the Duggars are a home-schooling, Bible thumping, “everybody but me is a sinner” family living in Tonitown, Arkansas. Now Tonitown is not as isolated as Nunsuch, Ga., it lies between Fayetteville where the University of Arkansas resides and Bentonville where Walmart’s home office directs the sales of everything to everybody in the world. There are educated people in the area, and obviously a great number of people with a high level of sophistication.
The Duggars chose to isolate their children from the world and keep them ignorant to any opposing view to their “Quiverfull Movement” viewpoint. The Quiverfull Movement is a pyramid scheme where the fathers in a family take it upon themselves to change the world by overpopulating it with sycophants. The sycophants breed, all pay homage back to the paternal unit. The women are kept “barefoot and pregnant” as the saying goes, and are only allowed to fulfill the role of mother and dutiful wife. Work outside the home is forbidden for the woman, but who could hold down a job with more than three kids, much less nineteen?
Jim Bob, the patriarch of the family, apparently performed his role well. Uncle Ebb’s phrase, “hornier than a three balled Billy Goat”, seems to apply here. In Jim Bob’s defense to being nothing more than a stud, I did see him tell the television camera one time that “he made sure to spend a half and hour with each child individually each week”. So, mama Michelle is always pregnant and Jim Bob has only got a half an hour availability each week, who’s minding the kids? Turns out the kids are.
The police reports published in 2006 specify that for about a three year period, older brother Josh diddled his younger sisters, one of whom was five at the time. Josh seems to have ignored the sister closest to his own age, but did catch another unidentified female who was babysitting. Lest we say that this is a normal example of kids playing doctor, which kids do, Josh was fourteen when it started, and fifteen when he diddled the five year old. This is not a six and seven year old playing doctor, this is not a case of “being too curious about girls” as some of his victims recited on Faux News, this is child abuse.
The truly sad part of the story is that the parents that ignored the abuse (except for locking the children in their rooms at night), had the victims of the abuse sue the local police department for revealing the identity of the abuser. Seems like there was a very lucrative TV contract that got cancelled because the perfect parents weren’t quite so perfect. TLC remedied the problem by giving the abused children their own show to follow their constant state of pregnancy as a balm for cancelling the parents.
Like all good stories, it doesn’t end here. Fast forward a few years and the “curious teenager” is in the news again forassaulting a pornstar. Meantime he’s started his own breeding program back in Tonitown. But never fear, his wife forgives him
To make Lite of the situation, I will forever change the term diddling to Duggaring, it seems like they’ve earned the scorn.
