First, let me address spectacle.
Whether you love 19 Kids and Counting and think it's just a wonderful family doing God's work, or if it's disgusting to you in every way, the Duggar family are in the news and this time, it's for the worst thing imaginable. Sexual abuse.
But, just like everything that the media hawks jump onto, this is just more fuel for the fire of the people who feast on this sort of scandal. Sad, empty lives with no meaning, so they feed and feed on the bad news of the minute, and from all that feeding comes a hugely skewed set of strong opinions that just fill the airwaves and interwebs with more of the same.
The wrong of it all.
Strip away the spectacle and you have a young man with a very repressed sexual experience, doing something horrible to his sisters and possibly some other young girls.
Now, at 14 and 15, is he culpable?
Yes.
But so are his parents.
The reality is, that with 19 kids, how can you expect to give each child a true and valuable upbringing? A parent with two kids may feel strapped to spend enough quality time with both of them, to feel they've done a good enough job. And, to be honest, what's good enough?
No Jim Bob and his wife, Michelle Duggar have to come to the front in all this. They handled it badly, and they allowed something to happen multiple times, because they're too busy raising a truckload of kids, they're too obsessed with their own particular religious views and they're too concerned about their popularity to deal with it at all appropriately.
The young man, Josh, needs help. The whole family does. He did wrong, yes. And that is awful. He must be held accountable and he must face the punishment for his deeds, but so should his parents.
For those with no voices.
The girls, for me, are the worst part of all of this. They have had no therapy, they're given no second thought by their parents. They're just treated like objects that a naughty boy played with. Those girls are already having to deal with horrible retribution being rained on the family and are caught between that and the terrible indoctrination about sexuality coming from these people who cannot stop having sex long enough to realize it's ruining theirs and their children's lives.
The girls need help.
First, it should be that they are removed from this household. Sorry, we've taken kids away from parent's because the parents were "off the Grid, and everyone is all up in arms about that, but they're fine with 19 kids living in the same home? They're fine with sexual misconduct, too. They're fine with the fact that the parents have done such a paltry job of setting an example that the kids don't stand a chance, says a lot about how messed up the people's priorities are in this situation.
Focus on the victims of these crimes.
Setting the Example.
There's nothing wrong with raising your kids in a religious lifestyle. Only, give the kids a choice. Once they're old enough to start having sexual pressures internally, a completely natural thing, incidentally, start helping them figure out a way to express that sexuality in a healthful and thoughtful way. Curiosity about one's sexuality is nothing to be considered a sin. What can be considered a sin is on one side never using contraception, even when you could be endangering over a dozen kids, and other side, expecting your kids to remain chaste and celibate until they marry.
It's so hypocritical, that I'm not sure how a kid could ever come away from a situation like that knowing which way is up with their sexuality.
If you want your kids to be healthy sexually, you have to model that. Having kid after kid after kid isn't really a model that works, obviously, especially after you add the religious aspect of their beliefs.
As a former Catholic, the idea that you either abstained, or just kept having kids, was always suspicious to me, as though it was the Church's way of making sure there were always more believers.
I have some very good friends, who each have a large number of kids. I think it's great, and I have no problem with big families. That's not my point here. But, in many cases, youngsters need to know how to deal with their feelings. And in the raw and raucous lifestyle of a housefull of kids, you need to be on your game dealing with all the things that happen to developing kids.
So, it seems to me that the Duggar family could have done one or more things to prevent this whole thing, if they'd thought it through.
First, they could stop having kids. They could spend more time trying to educate their kids about sexual responsibility and not just teaching repressive tenets based on ancient (and well outdated) scriptures.
And they could take care of their daughters.
So why we love this as a spectacle, I'll never understand. But as long as there are young people in this world, it will always be their parent's and guardian's responsibility to teach and emulate sexually healthy lifestyles, accepting all variations thereof, and expecting that kids will be confused, scared and certainly ashamed of some of their feelings, until we help them sort it out.
Don't participate in the spectacle, but please do help to model what's right and what's wrong to your kids.
The Duggars are a perfect example of what not to do.
No comments:
Post a Comment