Elsewhere in tvworld, the Duggars are getting some pushback.
A petition on Change.org urging TLC to cancel the family’s reality show, “19 Kids and Counting,” is gaining momentum.
“End LGBTQ fear mongering by the Duggars,” a letter posted on petition page reads. “The Duggars have been using their fame to promote discrimination, hate, and fear-mongering against gays and transgendered people. You need to take a stand on the side of justice and cancel their show.”
The petition currently has over 78,000 signatures.
Not terribly impressive when you note that they have 400,000 likes on their Facebook page, but it’s a start.
Last week, the couple posted a Facebook photo of them kissing and encouraged other married couples to share their own. The caption read, “God designed marriage to be a loving, dynamic relationship between a husband and wife for a lifetime. God loves marriage and it is supposed to be full of love, joy, fun and romance,” it said. “We challenge all married couples to take a happily married picture and post it here.”
John Becker, of LGBT blog “The Bilerico Project,” posted a photo of him kissing his husband. He says his photo was later taken down and that he was banned from the Duggars’ page, according to E! News.
Well it’s like this. God doesn’t want human lips to make contact with other lips except when one of the humans is a man and the other human is a woman and the two of them are married to each other. Any other lip-to-lip contact is haram and sin and bad. Don’t even talk about tongues.
I never read any Duggar-related article on general principle – every click adds to their popularity rating, and so no matter what the content of the clicks, the network’s going to keep them on so long as they remain popular. Every time you click on an article related to them, you’re contributing to the development of a future 2 or 3 or 10 MORE articles about them. Cut them off, people!
But anyhow, what gags me out the most is that, when you see the parents in a picture together, the mom is typically looking up adoringly at the dad as if she’s a dog begging for table scraps. And the girls apparently do this, too (Yahoo puts a thumbnail photo next to the articles, so I don’t need to dignify them with a click). It’s disgusting, it’s demeaning, it’s dehumanizing.
Guys! If you want unquestioning obedience and adoration, get a dog (and please treat it well). If you want a partner, get a woman. A smart one. One who will challenge you intellectually. THINK about it.
Guys!! You can get a MAN partner, too!! But same criteria – one who will challenge you intellectually, one you can respect. Ideally, someone you can admire. THAT is the only partner worthy of you.
As Libby Anne pointed out over at Patheos, it’s a pity the push-back didn’t come early due to some of the Duggars’ appalling beliefs and practices (their religious group that was headed until recently by a pedophile, their corporal punishment ways of raising children, their oppressive treatment of their adult daughters, etc). But I’ll take push-back when it happens, especially since it irritates me to see TLC white-wash all the negative aspects of what the Duggars do and represent.
Have the networks ever considered the TV potential of following a group of atheists in their place?
Could be quite exciting, taking elevator trips with Dawkins and Shermer. The wild parties. Carving sculptures of Baphomet for state capitols. etc. etc.
Whitewashing: Quiverfull families typically make all the children’s clothing, and dress them in gender-specific uniforms, alarmingly similar to the uniforms of the FLDS inmates. They changed that for the show. Mrs. Duggar has admitted “blanket training”, an appalling method of “training” babies to not be any trouble – the infant is set down in the middle of a baby blanket stretched out upon the floor, with a toy or two on the blanket. Every time a part of the infant goes beyond the edge of that blanket, that part is smacked with a whip or a stick or a wooden spoon or something like that. The infant quickly learns to not be curious, to not explore, to just *sit*. THIS is what it takes to make having so many children possible for the parents – geddit? This, and saddling all the children from age 6 with caring for and parenting their younger siblings – Ma and Pappy are too busy in the bedroom, kids! And parent those little ones proper-like, or you’ll git a whuppin’!
Patriarchal – the males rule, and females are expected to obey. Fathers typically arrange their daughters’ marriages with the fathers of other Quiverfull families – they meet and network at these “conferences”. The daughters are expected to go from obeying their fathers to obeying their husbands, often with no input to the marriage decision.
Homeschooling is required – surely you didn’t even have to ASK about THAT detail!!
Even the babies’ rights to proper nutrition come a distant second to the parents’ ideology – breast-feeding is typically only allowed for a few months (certainly less than a year!) because of its effect on delaying the return of the mother’s menses. So while these Quiverfull loonies insist that they accept that “God will open the woman’s womb at His pleasure” (ugh – threw up a little on my keyboard there), they strictly manage the nursing period to optimize the woman’s fertility. Apparently, a nursing babe is too much for their God…common sinful mortals have to run the schedules and whatnot.
Here is an article, http://www.patheos.com/blogs/nolongerquivering/2010/03/nlq-faq-are-jim-bob-michelle-duggar-quiverfull/, which includes this lovely excerpt:
Except for “Your parents first”, of course O_O
I happened to catch a few frames of the program while over at a friend’s house for wine 😀 – those girls obviously have extensions, and their hair is styled as if they were Kate Middleton or Kim Kardashian, to the point that they clearly move very carefully so as not to disturb their hairstyles! Perhaps their audience is expected to tell them apart on the basis of how they wear their hair? And don’t get me started on the obvious bucketload of makeup that’s caked onto their faces – who’s fooled by this??
Are they just the freak show du jour?
Their attitude: “Sex outside of man/woman, bad!”
Also their attitude: “Sex inside the church, good! Literally, inside the church!”
http://radaronline.com/exclusives/2014/11/jessa-duggar-wedding-church-sex-scandal/
The show will eventually get cancelled when the daughter gets divorced or her hubby cheats, or when the parents make a “duck dynasty” type statement, or a Palin-like fight occurs. It’s inevitable. People who live lives of hypocrisy can’t keep up a front 24/7/365, the cracks always appear.
re: BQ’s comment (#5), when any other group tries this stuff (e.g. the moonies, mormons, mennonites), they get labelled a cult. The smaller the group, the more orthodox and fanatical the beliefs become. Having few members makes them easy to control, mass control is only possible if many agree with the dogma. That’s likely one reason for promoting “quiverfull” nonsense: create your own large population and control them from birth. It’s easier to brainwash someone who never knows any different, rather than outsiders.
What those people don’t understand is that their “lifestyle” will lead to generations of poverty. The damage will last decades and generations, even if there’s no sexual abuse (which there often is) within families and communities controlled by religious dogma.
The Duggars are bad enough.
What puzzles me, though, is this: Why don’t more people get upset with “Sister Wives? The idea of four Dozy Bints servicing some useless scrote makes me puke.
And…there should be a baby for every lip contact. You wouldn’t want to thwart God’s plan for world conquest.
Yes, @6 leftover1under, and that is the most child-abusey aspect of all. No education. No prospects. Poisonous religion. Young marriage. All the risk factors for poverty right there.
People might enjoy this article about how the most conservative Christian attitudes are marriage-killers:
Where did the Duggars get money in the first place, before their lucrative reality TV show? I find it entirely disingenuous to suggest that the kids aren’t angling for their own reality TV cash cows. I’ve read several large-family accounts, and the poverty aspect is inescapable. Did they have all those violins and nice clothes before being picked up by the show? Did their underground cult somehow collect the stuff to make them look more acceptable?