June 24, 2021

By Beth Arnold

On Thursday, June 17, lawyers for reality TV star and former Republican political operative Josh Duggar asked for his trial to be delayed until after February of 2022. Attorneys Justin Gelfand and Travis Story filed a motion to continue so that their computer forensics expert could more thoroughly evaluate Duggar’s computers and cellphone. Duggar, 33, was arrested on April 29th in his hometown of Springdale, Arkansas, and charged with receiving and possessing child pornography. His trial is currently set for July 6 before U.S. District Judge Timothy Brooks in federal court in the county seat of Fayetteville.

As soon as I heard the news of Josh Duggar’s arrest, I thought, Here we go again. And not just with Duggar, who in 2015 was exposed by In Touch Weekly, which dropped the bombshell of a 2006 police report revealing that Duggar had fondled five girls as a teenager. No—my “Here we go again” also referred to yet another Right-Wing Christian Sex Scandal.

Josh Duggar kept it in the family. Four of the five victims were Duggar’s sisters, and the fifth was a babysitter. No charges were ever filed. Duggar’s “19 Kids and Counting” reality star parents, Jim Bob and Michelle, admitted that they and elders of their church knew about Josh’s abuse of the girls. Jim Bob reported that, as a result, Josh “did manual labor and had counseling.”

Said counseling would most likely have been dubious “Christian counseling” suggested by a cult the Duggars have been involved in for many years—the Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP). Within IBLP, the Advanced Training Institute (ATI) was the extremely conservative, repressive, anti-science, and ultimately damaging home-schooling curriculum the Duggars used in educating their children. IBLP was founded by pastor Bill Gothard, who resigned from his organization in 2014 after being put on administrative leave due to allegations that he was sexually harassing women. On an IBLP/ATI/Gothard survival website called Recovering Grace, 34 women reported the IBLP founder, including four reports of molestation.

Any counseling Duggar might have received at the time most likely relieved him from any personal responsibility for his behavior, since teachings in the cult promoted victim blaming. Jim Bob and a church elder also took Josh to speak to former Arkansas State Trooper Joseph Truman Hutchens, who gave him a “very stern talk.” As luck would have it, Hutchens himself was imprisoned in 2007 for child pornography.

What is it about the judgment and values of conservative “Christian” authority figures in terms of what they say publicly about issues of sex and sexuality, what they do in reality, and the ruinous results? How many times have we seen the downfall of judgmental, uncompromising “Christian” leaders like Jim Bakker, Jerry Falwell Jr, Jimmy Swaggart, Frank Page, Ravi Zacharias, and Gothard with their own sex scandals? People in glass churches shouldn’t throw stones, but they should consider the implications of the hypocrisy, confusion, and shame that their hateful lessons instill in people. Their own self-hatred is a good example for others to loathe themselves.

Let us segue from the fundamentalist, conservative religious community that Duggar is part of to the same extremely conservative religious community that has saturated Republican politics. In fact, let’s take the four years of the Trump presidency. We watched the most Right Wing Christian Republicans disregard Trump’s sexual escapades, which were widely known and highly publicized, including his suspect relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and his now iconic “Grab ‘em by the pussy. You can do anything,” remark, among other appalling male chauvinist convictions that he has demonstrated. Women and gay boys or men are still seen, more or less, as chattel by those who have the power to abuse them, including Donald Trump. And most ultraconservative Christian Republicans couldn’t seem to care less about Trump’s lack of morals or ethics. One wonders, in fact, where their “family values” lie.

The Duggar family is proudly Republican, and we have seen indications of their endorsement of Trump, including this photo of “Trump 2020” boldly cut into the grass outside the family home. Some supporters have said that their backing of Trump excludes their approval of his sexual proclivities, but that’s an out and out deception on their part. Trump’s contempt for women is an integral part of who he is—it’s a building block of his dark character. No one can honestly pretend that Trump’s misogyny doesn’t exist or evade taking responsibility of his or her sanction of him by saying his sleeping around and his abuse of women doesn’t count. With the advent of the #MeToo movement, gone are the days of boys will be boys with a wink and a chuckle on the side, at least publicly.

Due to the Duggars’ tremendous success with their reality TV show “19 Kids and Counting” and their big fan base, there was a time when every ambitious conservative politician in this country was happy to forge a connection with them for a bump in the polls.

Josh Duggar worked on the Republican presidential primary campaign of former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee in 2008, and the Duggars and the Huckabees have voiced their support for each other many times since. “Janet [Huckabee] and I want to affirm our support for the Duggar family,” Huckabee wrote in a 2008 Facebook post. “Josh’s actions when he was an underage teen are as he described them himself, ‘inexcusable,’ but that doesn’t mean ‘unforgivable.’ He and his family dealt with it and were honest and open about it with the victims and the authorities. No purpose whatsoever is served by those who are now trying to discredit Josh or his family by sensationalizing the story. Good people make mistakes and do regrettable and even disgusting things.”

Reactionary Christian Republican pastors should know. So many have felt the sting of being outed for their hypocrisy and lies. But honest and open about it? This sounds like one of the fabricated press briefings of Huckabee’s daughter Sarah Huckabee Sanders during her tenure under Trump (as well as in her current run for the Arkansas governorship). What would either Huckabee have said if this had been a Democrat?

Josh Duggar has said that his family were the “epitome of conservative values.”

In 2012, he also spoke at rallies for the Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum. And from June 2013 to May 2015, Duggar was executive director of FRC Action, a political action and lobbying organization sponsored by the Family Research Council, which the Southern Povery Law Center has designated a hate group. “FRC often makes false claims about the LGBT community based on discredited research and junk science. The intention is to denigrate LGBTQ people as the organization battles against same-sex marriage, hate crime laws, anti-bullying programs and the repeal of the military’s ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy.”

As it turns out, Family Research Council president Tony Perkins goes way back with the Duggars. When he put Josh Duggar onboard his organization, he said that by hiring the then 25-year-old, his organization hoped to appeal to more young people by tapping into the popularity of the Duggar family’s series. The point was to further Christian Right positions with opposition to abortion, gay marriage, and divorce.

Ditto Right-Wing politicians who wanted to advance themselves with a connection to the Duggars and their show. This was a fine opening for Josh, who did his job well. His photo was all over social media with politicians Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, Jeb Bush, and more.

What about now? Are they still his friends?

This happy conjunction of Right-Wing Republican politics and manufactured pseudo-celebrities from bad reality TV was made possible by The Learning Channel, otherwise known as (TLC). This pay television channel discovered that if it took particular slices of the American pie—one could rightly interpret this as freaks—they could build an audience and make enormous profits. Voila. Bad reality TV was born. (Apologies to those with reality shows.) Then came the dumbing down of America in the name of corporate greed. I lived in France at the time and could see this happening from across the Atlantic.

Of course, TLC isn’t the only one, but it was one of the pioneers. It’s a shame since The Learning Channel was founded in 1972 by the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare as well as NASA to actually be an educational tool. (If you have any interest at all, it’s worth reading about.) The Discovery Channel, which was known at the time for nature and documentary programs, bought it in 1991, rebranded the channel TLC, and began building this lucrative, vapid market.

In 2015, after the Duggar news broke, TLC eventually was shamed into cancelling its “19 Kids and Counting” cash cow reality show. It took them two months. A little later in 2015, TLC found a way to bring back the moneymaking misfit Duggar brand with a new show called “Counting On.”

“Good people make mistakes and do regrettable and even disgusting things,” said Mike Huckabee the last time Josh Duggar was in sex abuse trouble. When it comes time for Duggar’s trial, will the Huckabees be there for him—or will they take back their support? And what about the rest of the Republican Right-Wing, who Duggar expertly promoted and his family have avidly validated with their super conservative beliefs? Will the IBLP and other repressive Christian religious groups embrace or reject him? Only time will give us these answers.

Beth Arnold is an award-winning journalist whose prime topics are culture, politics, travel, art, and design. She is the author of Jours of Our Lives: On the Road in France and Beyond, a chronicle of her and her husband’s move to France, where they lived for a decade.

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