Josh Duggar speaks at the Family Leadership Summit
By now, the story is everywhere. Reality TV son Josh Duggar has had to step down as executive director of Family Research Council Action and apologize for having molested several underage girls, including his own sisters, when he himself was 14 years old. The fact that Josh Duggar was 14 years old at the time weighs heavily with me, and I think should with all of us. The question is how his family—especially
19 Kids and Counting patriarch Jim Bob Duggar—responded to Josh's actions at the time and took steps to ensure that his pattern of sexual abuse wouldn't continue, and what the family learned from the experience as they went on to become national figures. The answer to the first question appears to be "badly and inadequately," and the answer to the second appears to be "not much."
When they realized that their oldest son was molesting younger girls, sometimes while they slept, the adult Duggars disciplined him. When it continued:
Jim Bob then “met with the elders of his church and told them what was going on.” No one alerted the police or any other law enforcement agency. Instead they decided to send Josh to a “program [that] consisted of hard physical work and counseling. James said that [redacted, Josh] was in the program from March 17, 2003 until July 17, 2003.”
He said the program was a “Christian program.” Michelle Duggar later admitted to police that Josh did not receive counseling and instead had been sent during that time to a family friend who was in the home remodeling business.
Jim Bob and church elders subsequently took Josh to a state trooper for a "very stern talk," but didn't officially report the incidents. When police were later tipped off, the statute of limitations had expired. So Josh never faced legal trouble and he never got counseling.
These are people who hold themselves up, and who are held up on television, as models of sexual morality. For many observers it was clear before now that Duggar morality is founded on repression, but this adds secrecy and total lack of accountability to that score. Most importantly, it's clear that none of them—not Jim Bob, Michelle, or Josh—developed any compassion or hesitation about condemning others as a result of this.
Josh Duggar's career has been more or less as a spokesman for bigotry. It's obvious he didn't learn the lesson that he, as a child molester, was not in a position to judge others for their loving, consensual, adult relationships. So it may be worth asking if he learned the lesson that he shouldn't sexually assault people—true, his parents didn't even try to teach him not to judge others, but it doesn't seem like they tried all that hard to turn him away from his predatory behavior, either.
For what it's worth, Mike Huckabee, who the Duggars endorsed and campaigned for in the 2008 Republican presidential primary, is standing by Josh. Then again, even without a valued endorsement on the line, Huckabee has ample reason to want the things fine young Christian men do as teens to be erased from memory.