Try to control your shock: Flinty though she may be, Fox News'
Megyn Kelly is not going to give Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar too hard of a time over their mishandling of son Josh's teen habit of molesting underaged girls, including his sisters.
“I’ll take that reputation as a tough but fair journalist,” Kelly said. “However, this isn’t going to be a cross-examination of a family. It’s going to be an interview. I want to hear their story. And I think America wants to hear their story now.”
Their
story? The one they've had years to tell from a television platform about how great endless childbearing and total control of your daughters' sexuality is? Or their story of how they decided not to handle the molestation of their daughters and the discovery that their son was a molester in any kind of responsible fashion? But I mean, heaven forbid they should be cross-examined. That would be so rude!
Do expect Kelly to share some outrage with the Duggar parents over how "the fact that a presidential candidate has posed with some random member of the family that’s going through this issue is somehow a problem for the GOP’ers"—where "some random member of the family that's going through this issue" is Josh himself, who as executive director of Family Research Council Action has been a popular photo op for Republican politicians looking to prove how cozy with the far right they are.
Like so many uber-conservatives, the Duggars expect to be able to have it both ways—a cute, wholesome, if oddly large family on their reality show, and highly political campaigners for candidates like Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum and against marriage equality and transgender rights. They use their celebrity to advance their politics, and now, under fire, retreat into "just a family going through a tough time" mode.