So, I saw this thing from Ed this morning and I was surprised that some people, notably Sarah Posner, think that it’s a very big deal that one member of the enormous Duggar family was a sexual predator as a teenager and has, as a result, had to resign as a lobbyist for the Family Research Council. Now, when I say it like that, it makes it sound like I don’t think molesting kids is something to get concerned about. That’s not what I mean, obviously.
What I mean is that I didn’t realize that the Duggar family was anything more than some reality show novelty act. I never considered them as spokespeople for anyone, including the religious right. Sarah Posner has a very different view:
The Duggars are no ordinary spokespeople for the religious right; they are super-spokespeople. For years, they have been held up as exemplars of biblical living, of devotion to Christ, and of, especially, homespun honest living and sexual purity. It’s long been obvious to many that this is a product of marketing and packaging, not reality. But now no one can pretend anymore.
Posner is careful to give some examples to support her view, and I am not going to contest her basic characterization here. But, if this is correct, then it just goes to show how thoroughly I am able to ignore a major area of our popular culture. I probably haven’t thought once about this family in the last five years.
Every once in a while, I am forced against my will to acknowledge that there are popular reality shows, like Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and Duck Dynasty. And these shows and some of their more popular characters seem to have an ability to inject themselves occasionally into the national political dialogue.
I find this irritating and my default reaction is to run in the other direction.
So, maybe it matters greatly that the Duggars aren’t quite as flawless as they’re made out to be. Maybe this will cripple the religious right.
I just have a blind spot for this stuff and find it hard to believe.
The Duggars aren’t just TV personalities, they also wield considerable political influence in Arkansas (and elsewhere presumably, given how many of the current crop of GOP presidential hopefuls have had their photos taken with the molesting son Josh)due to their roles as leaders in the fundamentalist religion industry. In AR they recently played a key role in repealing an anti-discrimination bill via targeted ads attacking transgendered people and their use of public toilets.
It may make for dumb TV, but this family has had an outsized impact for the worse on a lot of people who didn’t deserve it–way beyond even all the girls who got molested by young master Josh. So I guess maybe this stuff matters enough to pay more attention to.
That’s putting it mildly. Not only did the most politically activist Duggar kid molest teenage/pubescent girls (likely including his own sisters, even!) but the Duggar parents covered it up. Even more shocking, the police officer involved turns out to be a big child porn aficionado, which might be a coincidence, but certainly raises the possibility of a larger conspiracy. Seriously, what are the odds?
didn’t they send him for “help” to the guy who is now serving decades for child porn?
What many on the left fail to realize is that shows like this and Duck Dynasty have a large following outside of the religious right.
Duck Dynasty is actually not that horrible a show if you watch it without trying to analyze what is actually going on. It only blatantly pushes religion at the end of each show when the whole clan is sitting down for dinner and says grace. Other than that, religion only comes up at Christmas.
But there are subtle other things that go on, messages sent, that worm their way into viewers minds.
Same with the Duggars, except they are a little more open with their religiosity.
My point is that many people who are neither far right evangelicals or political conservatives watch those shows.
Duck Dynasty lost a lot of viewers when the patriarch’s rather blatant racism came out (the show tried to ameliorate that by bringing in a graddaughter or other child relative who is mixed race.) But that only applied to those viewers who were even aware of the situation.
This is more serious, and is being far more publicized, so I expect this show to, if it stays on the air, suffer even more.
Will this cripple the religious right? I doubt it. But this show’s more subtle indoctrination won’t be impacting as many people.
Duck Dynasty’s audience might not be exclusively conservative, but it’s very conservative leaning. More so than any other show that I can think of:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2013/08/22/red-america-blue-america-and-reality-tv/
“The map shows the percentage of viewers who tuned in to the Aug. 14 season four premiere of “Duck Dynasty,” the A&E reality series about a family from West Monroe, La., that makes duck calls for hunters.
The season premiere got huge ratings in the Lake Charles, La. media market, where more than 52 percent of households tuned in. The show got ratings higher than a 30 percent share in 25 media markets, which National Media’s Will Feltus tells us is comparable to most Super Bowls. Of the top 15 media markets that tuned in to the premiere, only three — Lima, Ohio, Charleston, W.Va. and Evansville, Ind. — are outside the South.
Those are amazing ratings, especially for a cable show. “Duck Dynasty” was the second-most watched prime time show on Aug. 14, and the only show in the top 10 most-watched that aired on a cable channel. Only the “America’s Got Talent” live results show, on NBC, scored a higher rating; the other eight shows of the night were all on NBC, CBS or ABC.
Perhaps not surprisingly, West Coasters and urbanites were least likely to watch. The show did worst in the San Francisco, San Diego and Los Angeles media market, where only 2.5 to 3 percent of households tuned in. New York, Boston, Las Vegas and Chicago were all near the bottom in media market performance.”
Didn’t say that the following was mostly non-conservative, but that it is still somewhat sizeable. And Duck Dynasty had already lost a lot of viewers by the time season 4 rolled around which was after the issue of racist comments came around. That did hurt them, but this situation will be more painful for the Duggars.
I have a pretty strong feeling that whoever is behind those NCIS series is given a list of plot suggestions from someone in the State Dept for the upcoming year.
I fear the Duggar because am worry theyre the tip of the spear in the rights plan to outbreed the rest of us.
Josh Duggar is like David Vitter and Bill Cosby an other moralizing speakers who got caught in their hypocrisy. But unlike Vitter, Duggar and Cosby committed crimes. And those around them shielded them. For a decade in Duggar’s case. For several decades in Cosby’s.
That is all aside from the apparently large number of closeted gays in the conservative movement and Republican Party who are expert at clapping louder.
And it is all aside from the politicization of personal morality as a wedge issue to avoid confronting the social and collective morality of policy decisions.
Not the first Family Research Council prop to fall and probably not the last.
But what it does mostly is play to the hillbilly stereotype held by the rest of the country. When it’s just a little radical patriarch just trying to get a head start. Gender ideology does matter for more than identity. It sets expectations of power, obligations, and constraints. The Family Research Council has been about shutting up feminists for 34 years.
A bunch of Ivy League anti-feminists become political allies of Jim Bob Duggar, GOP wanna-be powerhouse, who was a state legislator from 1999 to 2002 and in 2002 jumped in the primary for US Senate, losing to Tim Hutchinson. Jim Bob is the son of a small town realtor and is a realtor himself.
The story of Josh Duggar’s molestation of his younger sisters is from 2003, when Josh Duggar was 15. The parents knew this when they solicited an appearance on the Oprah Winfrey Show. Winfrey likes building her audience in the white South with just such conversations with weird Christian folk in which Winfrey can deploy the common values theme. But Winfrey scrapped the appearance after finding out about the molestation. Not the least because another staple of Oprah Winfrey’s shows is victims of abuse speaking out about the issue.
Nonetheless, the Duggars once again went for the television opportunity, this time as the weird Christian family on a reality TV show.
Craziness gets GOP members of Congress media time. “Weird Christian family” gets the Duggars and the Robinsons media attention. For a Southerner, it pays well, gets a propaganda platform, and can be painted with the brush of “Christian ministry”. In deep austerity with 19 kids, that’s something.
It is clear why the parents wanted it hushed up and why it would not have remained a private crime like most family sexual abuse in the US. It was politically and economically inconvenient if you are planning on using lots of children as your story to get on TV.
Now do you get why politicians keep conflating homosexuals and pedophiles? It preys on all the many dirty little secrets of American family life.
An American Family was among the first TV reality shows. (The BBC did one called 7 Up beginning in 1963.) Shot in 1971 and 1973, the Loud family let their lives unfold before the PBS cameras, including Lance Loud’s coming out as gay.
What has happened here is the self-destruction of the conservative moral wisdom of ignorance and religious upbringing. The moral pretensions that the Duggars were peddling to the rest of the country have been shown to be a sham.
Now explain to me why the Family Research Council hired a 27-year-old as executive director if the job has any importance at all? Wingnut welfare I understand; the poor little baby elephants can’t compete in today’s economy. The hired an actor with a TV presence and seven years experience being on a reality TV show. What does that get them politically?
Wow, There are some weird undercurrents feeding the media beast these days. There really needs to be some coverage of the conservative and fundamentalist network of ministries working the entertainment industry in Los Angeles. Institutionally, they are how Arkansas bible churches get mainlined into the culture just like FoxNews is how neo-Confederate ideology gets mainlined into the culture.
Agreed and just FYI, Oprah is a victim herself of abuse. She has spoken about it publicly and it is a line that she can’t abide
In DrRJ’s coverage on the front page of Daily Kos, there was this paragraph:
The cop who sternly lectured Josh Duggar is in prison 56 years for child pornography. Some mentor!!!
Springdale is roughly 70,000 population. Headquarters of Tyson Foods.
We are not talking mountain cove cousins or trailer trash here. These are standard variety middle class sorts of people at least one generation away from a farm. Duggars grandparents were in real estate and so is Jim Bob.
Turn over another rock and Springdale starts to look like Peyton Place.
The values claim always was overblown bullshit purely designed to change the subject from the absence of real policy solutions.
It is rooted in the Reconstruction preachers’ view that it was immorality and drunkeness and “straying from Gawd” (unspecified) that brought the destruction of the Civil War on the South and not the immorality of the institution of slavery — for after all, these preachers too held slaves. Thus the constant call for a revival of Chrisitianity. Thus the constant call for a return to fundamentals of the simple Gospel. Thus a denial of the massive amounts of discussion of justice in the Bible.
Well justice catches up to an eighth grader who never was given the clues of how to behave with respect. And awash in a culture with extreme double messages.
Too bad that his parents and their political allies want to perpetuate that cultural double-bind.
kind of interesting that they sent him to stay w a kiddie porn afficienado; what did they send him to learn ? note that the judge has destroyed the police records
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/josh-duggar-s-police-records-destroyed
What’s a duggar?
As of today, toast, as near as I can tell…
equals a Quiverful
(send $1 plus S&H and I will send a Redneck Decoder Ring/Calculator)
Every once in a while, I am forced against my will to acknowledge that there are popular reality shows, like Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and Duck Dynasty. And these shows and some of their more popular characters seem to have an ability to inject themselves occasionally into the national political dialogue.
It does seem weird to me that cable shows which attract relatively small minorities of the viewership get so much press and attention. As someone who’s never watched any reality show, nor any cable series, (and who is by definition therefore way outside the mainstream) I’ve been both fascinated and dismayed by this fact. Whether it is every politician knowing who Snookie is (I think that was the name) or nearly every left wing blog breathlessly discussing the latest episode of Game of Thrones … well, I just don’t get it.
But this behavior makes me think of a Brave New World. Or maybe 1984. Bread and Circuses.
What I hate is that The Learning Channel is no longer about Learning. Arts & Entertainment is not longer about the Arts. The History Channel rarely deals with History any more. All these channels that got their start appealing to things we care about have been co-opted by the far right.
And the Public Broadcasting System is no longer supported by public funds, is more cable than broadcast, and has become just a system. And it’s educational television mission is long gone. Even Nova and other traditional educational shows now specialize in click bait segments.
National Geographic has gone down that same rabbit hole, alas. You can still find the occasional decent program on any of these systems, but the signal to noise ratio is abysmal.
and exactly why should l give a fuck?
you can’t convince the stupid, so why bother trying.
booooooooring!
Max Blumenthal tweeted a link to a chapter from Republican Gomorrah that in 2009 covered religious right guru Bill Gothard, who is also the Duggars religious guru.
The Nightmare of Christianity: How Religious Inductrination Led to Murder
The story here is unrelated to the Duggars, but it goes into the mindset that followers of Bill Gothard are invited to embrace. Some are just more ruthless in their diligence than others.
And still others get caught up in its closed cult qualities.
Look at this from an analytical rather than a polemical perspective.