Josh Duggar
Promotional poster from docuseries ‘Shiny Happy People.’ / Amazon Studios
Families like the Duggars go to great lengths to ensure their kids never learn to give anyone the middle finger — and I can only imagine the Duggar children would have been strictly punished if they had. But as a Christian and a father, I believe it’s neither possible nor desirable to exert total control over my children’s education and experience of the world around them.
Josh Duggar attends the March for Marriage rally in Washington, D.C., on April 25, 2014. Credit: Patsy Lynch/Media Punch/Alamy Live News
For many of the people who watched the show and enjoyed the Duggar’s supposedly wholesome, winsome lifestyle, the recent conviction and sentencing of the eldest child, Josh Duggar, to 12 years in prison on multiple counts of possesion of child pornography may be shocking. How could a family with such strong “Christian values,” who kept their children far away from the evils of “The World,” have created this?
Image via RNS.
Earlier this week, word got out that Josh Duggar of the TLC reality show 19 Kids and Counting had two accounts with Ashley Madison, the website where married people go to look for sexual partners to cheat on their spouses.
The site, whose tagline is “Life is short. Have an affair,” was the target of an enormous hack, which exposed the email addresses and some credit card information of its nearly 37 million users.
Duggar is not the only famous name to be associated with the site, and as people continue to sift through the expanding database, he surely won’t be the last.
But this column isn’t about Josh Duggar. It’s about Josh’s wife, Anna, and the misguided notions of forgiveness that some Christians subscribe to.
Josh Duggar. Photo via REUTERS / Brian Frank / RNS
A former Arkansas state trooper claims the Duggar family concealed the extent of their son’s alleged fondling of underage girls when the patriarch of the family turned to him for help disciplining the teenager more than a decade ago, the tabloid In Touch reports.
The tabloid broke the original story that Josh Duggar, the eldest son of the Duggar family, from the TLC reality show 19 Kids and Counting, had allegedly molested girls when he was a teenager. It published a 2006 police report on the incident.
Duggar has since apologized for “acting inexcusably” as a teenager and has resigned as executive director of the Family Research Council’s lobbying arm.
Josh Duggar, formerly executive director of the Family Research Council Action. Image via RNS.
The Duggars, the reality television family famous for its progeny (19 Kids and Counting) and its conservatism, are reeling now that oldest son, Josh, has been forced to acknowledge he was investigated for molesting underage girls when he was a teenager in Arkansas.
Josh Duggar apologized Thursday and abruptly resigned his job at the Family Research Council in Washington, one of the leading conservative groups fighting abortion and gay marriage among other causes.