In what can only be described as one of the more unfortunate circumstances I've ever personally encountered, the news of Josh Duggar's past sexual molestation of five girls (allegedly including one or more of his siblings) broke while I was in the middle of reading Nabokov's Lolita. And for anyone who hasn't read the book but is familiar with the basic storyline, it's way more uncomfortable how much you're in Humbert Humbert's head when you're reading the book (as opposed to the suddenly not-that-bad Kubrick screen version from 1962). Ole HH is not an "unreliable" narrator; he's a pervy one. But the book is much more than just him and Dolores Haze having sex. Thankfully.
Nabokov's book is a work of fiction, and you can read it and enjoy it and not think that you're a bad person for doing so. 19 Kids and Counting was purporting to be "real life," and I can't help but think all those millions of people who watched the show could use a few thousand showers now to try and wash the stink of the Duggar family off of their collective bodies.
In the interest of full disclosure, I thought the show and the family were creepy long, long before this news broke. I remember one of the first times one of my relatives turned it to TLC and I saw this family in Arkansas who had way too many kids, all of them with names that started with the letter "J" (whether for Jesus or Jim Bob, I don't know). Jim Bob's helmet hair and Michelle's cult-member thousand-yard stare raised red flags with me almost immediately, and I tried to argue, time and time again, that this family was "not all there" mentally. Boy, do I wish that's all there was to it, that it was just a difference of opinion between me and my Socialist/Communist, anti-American ways and their borderline insane political views. Boy, if only that was all there was to it.
But of course, as we found out, it's not. The facts of the case (in dispute, but probably not by much at this point) are well known unless you haven't been following it or just shut it out because of how utterly disgusting it all is. In a lot of cases of celebrity or political scandals, the cover-up is worse than the crime. In this case, the crime is unforgivable, and the cover-up equally so. Whatever your stance on the Duggars' lifestyle choices, the fact is that they not only harbored a pedophile for well over a decade without seeking treatment or law enforcement, they did so at the expense of victims who could very well have lived in the same household with the perpetrator. How fucking Christian is that?
What's almost as sick as the crimes that the Duggars condoned with their behavior is the rush to defend them from some on the far right who see the case as "religious persecution" because the Duggars are so prominent in family-values circles. If your politics requires you to defend (against all evidence to the contrary) a person who rapes little kids, or a group who condones such behavior through their silence, you should really re-examine your life. I'm looking at you, Huckabee.
TLC is reportedly trying to work out a way to "save" the show, which is cynical in the extreme because the Duggars make them money (and all this publicity for the network). I've never been a big watcher of that channel to begin with, but I certainly don't plan on watching it anytime soon, especially if they bring back the Duggars in some form or another. It's exploitation, pure and simple.
I am not a religious person, but I do know a little Bible, and the part where "judge not, lest ye be judged" is ringing through my ears as I think and type this. But here's the thing: I'm pretty sure that I'll never do anything like what Josh Duggar has done, so I feel pretty comfortable judging him. Child molesters can't "pray" the inclination away, much as homosexuals can't "pray the gay" away. Josh Duggar needs treatment, his victims need treatment, and his parents need to have their platform taken away. That's just the way it is. Fuck the Duggars, they are horrible, horrible people.
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