Recently, religious right blogger and podcaster Matt Walsh launched a vicious attack on Nashville’s Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) for providing gender-affirming care. While his claims that VUMC castrates minors are easily debunked, state officials as far up as Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee are taking them seriously.
In the wake of these attacks, Walsh has come under fire for his downplaying of the depravities of Josh Duggar, the oldest scion of America’s most infamous babymakers, Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar. Soon after it emerged that Josh had fondled several young girls during his teenage years—including his own younger sisters—Walsh joined most evangelical bloggers in essentially yelling that those God-hating liberals were ganging up on a good conservative Christian family. The scales partly fell off Walsh’s eyes after Josh was caught trolling for affairs on the website Ashley Madison. But even then, Walsh didn’t see Josh’s actions for the crimes that they were, but only as—wait for it—sin.
For this discovery, we have to thank A9, a collective of Christian left researchers best known as the folks behind the “Faithfully Antifascist” podcast. A9 takes its name from the date that Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor and leading opponent of the Nazi regime, was executed for his role in an unsuccessful attempt to blow up Hitler at his East Prussian headquarters.
A9 first discovered Walsh’s downplaying of Josh’s behavior on Sept. 22.
Specifically, an article Walsh wrote in May 2015 while he was still working at Glenn Beck’s TheBlaze. He claimed that liberals pillorying Josh and his parents as hypocrites were the real hypocrites—especially considering that Josh had “repented long ago” for his actions and “owned up to (them) and apologized again” after InTouch Weekly broke the story in 2015.
Fast forward to August 2015, soon after Josh’s name surfaced on a list of Ashley Madison users. Walsh took to Facebook to say that in light of that revelation, he’d misread the Duggar situation a few months earlier.
On the surface, Walsh seemed to have realized just how egregious Josh’s actions were. He noted—and rightly—that there was no way Josh’s apology could have possibly been sincere. After all, he was trotting out as “a Christian role model” while he was trolling for “one night stands” and “experimentation” on a platform for cheaters. Walsh also slammed Jim Bob and Michelle for allowing Discovery and TLC into their home when “they knew their family was in moral and spiritual turmoil.”
But, as they say, the devil is in the details. Throughout this post, Walsh continued to refer to Josh’s actions as “sin” and a case of failing to live up to his faith. This isn’t just wrong, it’s dangerously wrong. This wasn’t just a sin, but criminal conduct—something that should have been nipped in the bud while it was still possible to do so outside of juvenile hall or prison.
It may seem like a manner of semantics—until you consider that Walsh didn’t seem to have any qualms about standing by these portions of his earlier post in TheBlaze.
I know I'm opening myself up to serious criticism here, but let me be honest with you: If my own son, God forbid, came to me and admitted to doing what Josh Duggar did, I don't know that I'd immediately run to the cops.
Would you? Is it really that simple? The decision to have your child arrested as a sex offender would be an automatic thing for you? Really?
Apparently Walsh didn’t consider that maybe, just maybe, when your son admits to molesting girls, it’s time for a reality check. Especially considering that, as we now know, Josh admitted molesting a family friend who had been babysitting his younger siblings.
And yet, Jim Bob didn’t see it that way. Nor, apparently, did Walsh. This makes Walsh’s further take on the situation even more problematic, to put it mildly.
As a parent, you have to think whether your 14 year old son deserves to have his life ruined over his mistakes. Maybe you'd decide that he does. I can't say I'd agree.
Either way, there's no good answer. No simple answer. No happy answer. Something really, really bad has happened, and now you have to figure out the next step.
It's not easy to know the next step, but it is certainly easy for the rest of us to stand off at a distance, 12 years later, and declare that they took the wrong one.
No, Matt. There is only one answer. Even if you allow for Jim Bob and Michelle’s Christianist bubble keeping them from knowing that that one sibling inappropriately touching another is something that can’t be kept in-house, you shouldn’t need to be told that fondling a non-relative is a “break glass” moment. If you even have to ask “whether your 14-year-old son deserves to have his life ruined” in such a situation, something is very wrong.
In light of what has since transpired, Walsh’s take on the Duggars hasn’t aged very well. We now know, for instance, that Josh’s depravities took place while he and his family were living in unsafe, unsanitary, and unlawful conditions. At the time, as many as 16 people were crammed into a house in Springdale, Arkansas, that was designed for six people at most, far exceeding that house’s occupancy limits. With only three bedrooms, boys and girls had to sleep in the same room and even share beds. This was a situation where improper touching was bound to happen—and yet, Jim Bob and Michelle were willing to accept it as even a temporary situation once it did happen. One has to wonder—was it because Jim Bob and Michelle only saw Josh’s actions as sins, and not as potentially criminal conduct? It’s a fair question, given that they lived in that house for another three-plus years before moving to their current mansion in Tontitown.
That question became especially acute last winter, when Josh was convicted of possessing a tranche of child sexual abuse material on his work computer. He was sentenced to 12.5 years in prison, to be followed by 20 years’ supervised release. It is now clear that Josh went on this path because he never came to a mature understanding of the seriousness of what he had done to his sisters and that babysitter. He needed professional help, not merely forgiveness for sin. Now, because he didn’t get that help, he will not be allowed to be unsupervised around his own children for the duration of their childhoods.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is a textbook example of why it’s not enough to call sexual abuse of this type a sin. A convincing argument can be made that the mentality Walsh espoused is why Jim Bob and Michelle failed in their basic duty as parents and didn’t help Josh get to a mature understanding of his misdeeds. It’s why Walsh’s current pearl-clutching over gender-affirming care has to be taken with several helpings of salt.
