Very rarely do people piss me off for doing something that has no direct effect on my life, but Josh Duggar is the exception. He’s the oldest son in the Duggar Family – a family that doesn’t believe in birth control, and is vehemently opposed to marriage equality. If that’s what they want to believe, fine. Doom your children to an outdated, out-of-touch future in which their cult-like upbringing is directly at odds with the majority of reasonable, rational, fair-minded and accepting people of this country. But Josh Duggar, in addition to preaching and railing against marriage equality, committed a few sins that you really can’t commit if you are to stand in judgment of others. He molested at least five under-age girls when he was fourteen years old. A few of them were his sisters. And he’s admitted to it.
His parents, also adamantly and outspokenly against marriage equality, not only didn’t report the molestations in their home for over a year, they sent him to seek counseling from a man who is now in jail for possession of child pornography.
So let’s keep this simple and fact-based: Josh Duggar molested little girls in their sleep, but now wants forgiveness and redemption because he had the guts to admit it and apologize. Umm, WHAT? Because you said you’re sorry and regret it makes it all right and forgivable? That’s not how it works. The child molesters I’ve seen on the news don’t – and shouldn’t – get to say they’re sorry and move on with their lives. They robbed children of innocence, they raped and molested and ruined and destroyed – and neither they, nor you, Josh Duggar, get to apologize and receive any sort of exoneration.
A fourteen-year-old knows the difference between right and wrong. Touching the breasts and genitals of your little sisters while they were asleep is not a simple mistake, it’s a deliberate act of cunning and cruelty, one that was repeated more than once. Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar, the parents, didn’t report the events for over a year, making them just as guilty for not protecting their own daughters.
As someone who’s been on the general end of Duggar’s anti-gay-marriage rhetoric and views, I’m appalled by his actions.
As someone who believes that most people deserve some chance at forgiveness and redemption, I cannot find it in my heart to offer that to a child molester. A child molester is a sick fuck. A child molester like Josh Duggar, who molested his own sisters, is something so disgusting that it goes beyond any name or label that accurately designates the appropriate terror.
You may say what you like about my lifestyle or the choices I’ve made over the years, but not once was one of those choices to molest an under-age girl or boy. Not when I was fourteen, not when I’m forty, not ever. Josh Duggar chose to do that to his own sisters. If you can forgive that, if you can forget that, and if you can think it’s ok for that to have happened with no recompense, then you’re a better person than me.
Or maybe not.
