Josh Duggar and Ashley Madison--Thinking it Out

The gawking over the continued comeuppance of the Duggar clan by way of the revelations that the way in which these many children of the Quiverfull faithful aren't necessarily guaranteed to be exceptionally sexually continent, in the person of one Josh Duggar, is a little bit petty, I think.

Not because I think that the hypocrisy of the Christian Right isn't in and of itself shameful--it is.

But because I think, being a rationalist, I am not sure that we have any reason to expect someone raised in his worldview to behave better--we don't. He was raised to believe that sex outside of marriage--outside of straight, missionary, and vanilla, was a kind of damnable sin. Experiencing urges or temptations to act outside of the prescribed sexual roles, Josh Duggar figured he was damned enough and decided to roll with it. In a black and white view of morality, if you aren't simon-pure--what are you?

You're a perv. So that's the fitting role for old middle-aged before his time Josh Duggar. The first son--so if I understand the many pictures taken with so many of the GOP 2016 primary contestants, I would have to assume, the one the Duggar clan kind of thought might go into politics to spread the various odd ideas about family, homeschooling, and sexual continence...

And it turns out is exactly the example we've got for how traditional values go wrong. Because we learn a bit about how the fundamentalists find that incest is awfully common. And that for an aggrieved spouse, however humiliating the situation, leaving isn't socially permissible. So it kind of seems like an adulterous or incestuous individual can just do a smidgen of physical labor, get absolved by the powerful people in the same cult, and even hurt their family, ask for forgiveness, and be kind of okay, learning exactly nothing--especially how to regard their spouse as a human being and sexual partner who needs to be respected, consulted, and considered in all one's doings.

If I had any advice for these two, as a secular person old enough to be their young auntie, I'd say--if Anna needs to go to her brother's to feel safe or because this is too much, since he offered, it's no shame for her to go. She didn't do anything wrong and she shouldn't feel like she did--but, also, if this marriage does not have a future--own it. It is better your children be from a home that was broken, than to live in one that perpetually is.

And as for Josh Duggar, who paid to get a guaranteed affair at Ashley Madison's site (which was a total fraud, apparently) and who seems to have paid for sex with a porn star and behaved in a way so egregious that he was remembered, well--is this beyond the pale--or is his work against LGBT people worse?

I cant decide. I think he was raised with shit sexual hygiene. But if he had any decency, maybe he'd do better. My guess is that fundamentalism doesn't promote basic human decency. Maybe he needs to think about just how to be decent, and throw out his apparently wrong ideas about right and wrong.