I’d like to come out as the first person on record to praise Josh Duggar, former Executive Director of FRC (Family Research Council) Action for his participation in the online infidelity community known as Ashley Madison. Here’s a guy””a reality TV star””who molested five young girls, four of whom were his sisters, and according to his mother, got “treatment.” Apparently it worked. Josh got married, became a “natural marriage” advocate and tried everything to deny other people the right to marry from the perch of his “19 Kids and Counting” fame.
Then, of course, at the same time, he proceeded to seek adult women to have extramarital affairs with. It should give hope to every child molester out there: Why settle for just being a predator? You can be a fraud too!
Also as a dad-bod-sporting anti-gay icon claiming it’s discrimination for Christians not to be able to discriminate against gays, it’s refreshing that Josh isn’t gay himself. He’s defying yet another stereotype, this time of your typical, mouth-foaming homophobe: But when Josh thinks no one is watching””Satan lures him to the ladies.
Let’s not forget George Rekers, the co-founder of FRC who wrote the book, “Growing Up Straight: What Families Should Know About Homosexuality” and then in 2010 got busted with a hottie from rentboy.com. One of the Amazon reviewers named Paying Attention wrote, “This book has a great deal of information from a religious perspective on raising children to be heterosexual.” Clearly.
But don’t allow me to let you believe all anti-gay frauds are from the Family Research Council. There are plenty on the public dole too. (Some of whom are still in Congress and in the closet.) An incomplete list includes Rep. David Dreier (R-CA), Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL), Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID) and Rep. Aaron Schock (R-IL) These were all men who voted against gay rights””publicly denouncing their fellow homosexuals””only to get outed. The Ted Haggard model of professionally condemning gays and privately copulating with them is so common it’s almost expected. If you spend all your time obsessed with gay sex” maybe you’re a little obsessed with gay sex.
But not Josh Duggar. He’s a millennial bigot: smashing the tired tropes of the graying family values generation by being a horrible human being in a slightly different way.
Duggar The Sister Toucher wanted to keep same-sex couples from having equal rights because according to him it was an attack on marriage. He claimed radical gays will eventually throw Christians in jail for their faith! All while touting his own marriage as a “beautiful part of god’s design.”
As if gays ever got a chance to destroy Josh’s marriage!
(Author’s note: I can’t get outraged or upset by Ashley Madison users. I support legalizing prostitution and I assume a huge swath of their clientele are married men. I can’t parse being anti-cheater yet pro-escort. I’m pro-consensual sex and against phony moral crusaders. Save your letters.)
But Josh hasn’t stopped fighting for the values he’s not going to live up to. He’s blaming his moral depravity on The Interwebz. “I have been the biggest hypocrite ever. While espousing faith and family values, I have secretly over the last several years been viewing pornography on the Internet and this became a secret addiction and I became unfaithful to my wife.”
The Family Research Council is not only anti-gay and anti-choice but they’re also anti-porn. So Josh gets to further the cause by offering himself as the poster child for pornography victims. Porn made him stigmatize gays while entering his credit card information into an infidelity website. Porn made him cash his checks from the Family Research Council while, according to In Touch magazine, paying thousands of dollars to have unprotected rough sex while his wife was pregnant with their fourth child. It’s the wide availability of porn that made him a creep. Is there anything porn can’t do?!
Which raises the question: Is all this porn he’s “secretly” addicted to featuring only adults?
Here’s the thing: When it was first revealed Josh fondled young girls against their will, it was excused and rationalized by his parents and GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee with a shrug and a “boys will be boys” sentiment. God forgave him, we were told, so we should too. He was fired from FRC and his family featuring show was cancelled. But he exposed his parents and Huckabee, who have both accused transgender people of pedophilia, as child molestation apologists.
Now Josh has exposed a fatal flaw in all anti-gay hate mongers””and it can be summed up by a 400-year-old quote: They doth protest too much, methinks.
So much for bucking stereotypes.
Photo by Steve Snodgrass