The Josh Duggar scandal has been covered by multiple media outlets. Most people have been quick to point out the hypocrisy of Duggar, who served as the executive director of an organization that regularly links homosexuality and pedophilia, when he in fact sexually assaulted many underage girls. Unsurprisingly, the Christian news sites are coming to his defense, some even drawing parallels between Duggar and the story from the Bible where Jesus saved a woman accused of committing adultery.
Right now, the same people who conflate equal marriage with bestiality are jumping to Duggar’s defense, calling what he did a “mistake” and commending him for asking for forgiveness and getting “help.” One blogger went as far as to suggest that most teenagers commit sexual assaults against children. In response to a tweet saying “I don’t know what world you’re living in but ‘most teenagers’ don’t molest little girls,” Steven Crowder at Western Journalism said,
The thing is, you guys, they do. By 17-years-old, 48% of teenagers have had sex. One out of every three teenage girls gets pregnant before the age of 20. And it doesn’t count as consent just because you’re both under 18. Twenty-six and a half percent of 15-19-year-old girls are giving birth to kids – and those are just the ones that aren’t having abortions. And 17% of those births are to unwed mothers who already have at least one other child!
There is a huge difference between consensual sexual contact between teenagers and what Josh Duggar did to the girls he assaulted, who were mostly not teenagers. Crowder’s article doesn’t draw a distinction between non-consensual contact and pre-marital sex, though, because presumably both of those are “wrong” and “sins” so it doesn’t matter what the context was, right? (Oh and nice dig on young women who choose to have abortions too.) Can you guys believe that young women who aren’t married are having more than one child?? That is totally the same thing as Josh Duggar molesting a 4-year-old! Teenagers having pre-marital sex (because if they’re married teenagers then it’s OK, presumably) is logically equivalent to “teenagers molesting little girls,” which is exactly what the above paragraph implies.
This author and many other Christian apologists seem to conflate all pre-marital sex with “sin,” and so there is no differentiation between non-consensual and consensual acts. For more on this, read this article by Libby Anne, “Josh Duggar and the Tale of Two Boxes.”
How do we handle childhood sin? Yes, they should know better, but kids mess up. If we discipline them, they suffer consequences, repent, and turn their life around… What then? Do we show them grace and give them another shot at life? Or do we simply throw stones from our glass houses?
Given that this author has written other “thinkpieces,” such as “Dear Racist, Looting, Rioting Scumbags In Baltimore…” and “Top 5 Ways Liberals Are Already Submitting To Sharia Law,” I’m sure he has a suitably nuanced view on the injustices of the American criminal justice system and is likely anti-death penalty.
Another article that I’ve seen floating around is “The Duggars Aren’t Hypocrites. Progressives Are.” by Matt Walsh at The Blaze. It starts off with the same hogwash about how Josh Duggar committed sins and was wrong.
A Christian failing to live up to his faith does not make him a hypocrite. It makes him cowardly, perhaps. It makes him selfish. It makes him flawed. It makes him sinful. It makes him any number of things, but not necessarily a hypocrite. A hypocrite is an insincere person who misrepresents his own beliefs. But saying that you believe something is wrong, only to turn around and do it, doesn’t prove that you never held that belief. It just proves that you were too weak to stand by it.
I’m not diminishing Josh Duggar’s infractions. As I said, he did something very bad. Horrendous. Disturbing. Evil. These were major sins. But Christians commit major sins sometimes, which is the whole reason why Jesus died on the cross.
Actually, Josh Duggar is a hypocrite, because the commonly-accepted definition of a hypocrisy is “a pretense of having a virtuous character, moral or religious beliefs or principles, etc., that one does not really possess.” Considering the fact that Josh Duggar was part of an organization that condemned people for consensual sexual behavior (and equated it with non-consensual sexual acts) when he was knowingly guilty of sexual assault against children, I’m pretty sure that makes him a hypocrite. People are basking in the schadenfreude because he is such a prominent Christian, even though we should remember that real people were hurt by Josh Duggar and that is nothing to celebrate or feel good about.
Also, was this really the reason that Jesus died on the cross? So that people like Duggar could commit heinous sexual acts and then just ask for forgiveness and spend three months remodeling houses (a.k.a. working a job that many adults choose to do willingly, unlike prison)? This “loophole Christianity” is so bothersome to me and reminds me of the brutal story of Christina Johansdottor. (Warning: fucked up Christian reasoning and child death ahead.) If you’re not familiar, Johansdottor was a woman who lived in the 18th century and decided she wanted to commit suicide. But suicide is a sin, so she knew she would go to Hell if she did that, so instead she found a loophole. She killed a child, who she reasoned was going to Heaven because it was free of sin. And she freely confessed the crime, knowing that she would be sentenced to death, but she repented and asked for forgiveness, thus ensuring her passage to Heaven. And she wasn’t the only person who decided to commit such a “brilliant” crime in order to hasten death.
It’s always interesting to watch progressives discover sexual morality just in time to denounce a right winger, only to shed the pretense as soon as the next liberal pervert comes out of the woodwork.
Yep, you know those dirty liberals. Always condoning rape whenever fellow liberals do it. Would it surprise you to learn that feminists routinely call out rape culture and rapists? Probably, if you’re the author of the above quote.
As a parent, you have to think whether your 14 year old son deserves to have his life ruined over his mistakes. Maybe you’d decide that he does. I can’t say I’d agree.
If I had a son who sexually assaulted anyone, I would not consider it a “mistake.” I would consider it a crime and I would turn them over to the police. I would be more concerned about the people he sexually assaulted than his own future. I’m not the one who would have made the decision to ruin his life–he would have made that decision by knowingly committing sexual crimes. Fourteen is old enough to know the difference between wrong and right. If Josh Duggar was doing something he thought was right, he wouldn’t have done it while the girls were asleep, and he wouldn’t have continued to do it after first being told it was wrong by his parents (although who the hell knows what those clowns actually said to him, they could’ve even just told his sisters that it was their fault for committing the immodest crime of having female parts).
That said, I admire the family. They are living by their convictions, in defiance of cultural trends, and clearly bestowing a strong faith in all of their children.
In other words, this family lives by their convictions, which include never having their son convicted for committing a crime.