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Christianist blogger wags finger at Jinger Duggar Vuolo for opening up about her abusive childhood [1]
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Date: 2023-01-22
Jinger, the sixth child and fourth daughter of the Duggar clan, gave a series of interviews to People magazine to promote her upcoming book, Becoming Free Indeed. Last Wednesday, she revealed that she spent most of her childhood in an environment built around fear.
"Fear was a huge part of my childhood," Vuolo, 29, tells PEOPLE exclusively in this week's issue. "I thought I had to wear only skirts and dresses to please God. Music with drums, places I went or the wrong friendships could all bring harm." Even when her family went to play a sport called broomball, Vuolo says she felt "terrified" she might be defying God's will. "I thought I could be killed in a car accident on the way, because I didn't know if God wanted me to stay home and read my Bible instead."
Most of those tenets came from homeschooling guru Bill Gothard, whom you may know for teaching that it’s possible for a victim of sexual assault to “defraud” their attacker by stirring up lustful thoughts—even with something as innocent as a toss of the hair. That tenet was a major basis for the Duggars’ ultra-strict dress code, which calls for everything to be covered from the neck down even in northwest Arkansas’ brutally hot summers.
However, Jinger now realizes how harmful this was.
"[Gothard's] teachings in a nutshell are based on fear and superstition and leave you in a place where you feel like, 'I don't know what God expects of me,' " says Vuolo. "The fear kept me crippled with anxiety. I was terrified of the outside world." In 2017, her perspective began to shift. "His teachings were so harmful, and I'm seeing more of the effects of that in the lives of my friends and people who grew up in that community with me," she says. "There are a lot of cult-like tendencies." She ultimately walked away from IBLP altogether. While Vuolo stresses that she's still a strong Christian, her understanding of how to live her faith has changed.
Jinger went further the following Thursday, saying that she was taught that if she “step(ped) outside of what I think is expected of me,” God would be angry with her “and it could bring harm on myself.” However, she hopes sharing her story will “help even just one person to be freed.”
Watch more of Jinger’s interview with People here.
Now, who would have a problem with that? Well, Christian blogger Lori Alexander had a big problem with it. On Friday, she took to her blog, “The Transformed Wife,” in a post that essentially called Jinger an ungrateful brat for not giving “praise and thankfulness” to Jim Bob and Michelle for how they raised her, but only “condemnation.”
Alexander then reamed Jinger out for publicly speaking out about the harm her upbringing did, saying that a child had no right to speak out against her parents in this way.
What disturbs me most about this interview and Jinger’s new book is that she has thrown her parents under the bus in a most public way. The world is rejoicing! They love seeing the downfall of believers. They love that Jinger is now wearing short shorts and “living free” from the constraints her parents put upon her. I am not. It saddens me. Her parents don’t deserve this. They should be honored as God commands us to honor our parents. They weren’t abusive. They were cheerful and fun. I watched every TV show of theirs. Those children had wonderful lives! Yeah, some of Jinger’s thinking was bad. So? Most of us had some bad thinking in our childhoods, but it doesn’t mean we have to expose it publicly and make a mockery of the way we were raised.
Anyone who has followed the Duggar saga would know that Alexander’s take is tone-deaf at best. For one thing, it was Jim Bob and Michelle who threw their daughters under the bus by forcing them to live in such appalling conditions. For those who don’t recall, the Duggars’ house in Springdale had only two baths, forcing the kids to take showers in shifts. Even then, the water heater wasn’t enough to handle the amount of dishwashing, laundry, and diaper changing needed to care for such a large family. But most seriously of all, it had only three bedrooms, meaning boys and girls had to sleep in the same room—and even share the same beds. In other words, the Duggars created a situation in which improper touching was easily able to happen if someone was inclined to do so.
They threw their daughters under the bus by tolerating this situation as even a temporary solution after Josh fondled one of his sisters in March 2002. They threw them under the bus by not acting when Josh fondled a babysitter in July 2002—meaning that the third incident, in which Josh fondled his sister Joy, should have never been allowed to happen.
Furthermore, Jim Bob abdicated his duties as a husband and a father by even thinking he could stay in the state house in the face of a situation that any halfway decent father would have seen was a five-alarm fire. He compounded this failure by trying to run for U. S. Senate—and plunking down $250,000 of his own money to do it. That money should have been spent on finding a better living situation for his family. And to pile obscenity on top f insult and injury, he allowed Discovery into his home for the first of several specials that led to them getting their own show.
No father with any kind of love for his children would do this. And yet, Alexander apparently expects us to believe that such a “father” is deserving of honor—and that when a child realizes what happened, he or she ought to just be quiet about it.
What nerve this woman has. People like her are exactly why kids whose parents betrayed them don’t speak up. Indeed, I’m reminded of what happened Herschel Walker’s son, Christian, spoke up about the abuse he and his mother suffered at Herschel’s hands. A number of right-wingers essentially told Christian to sit down and shut up. The worst take that I saw came from Greg Kelly.
x Really Sad that CHRISTIAN WALKER is talking about things he knows NOTHING about. Did Herschel sit Christian down in 2009 (when Christian was TEN YEARS OLD) to tell him about some ex-girlfriend's issues? I DON'T THINK SO! This too shall Pass. GO @herschelwalker pic.twitter.com/hu6A8FU33u — Greg Kelly (@gregkellyusa) October 4, 2022
The sentiment Alexander expressed on her blog is no different—and is no less deserving of opprobrium. People like her are why the Duggars’ charade wasn’t exposed sooner. It’s a near-mathematical certainty that any Duggar child who thought about coming forward was afraid of getting attacked for not “honoring” Jim Bob and Michelle in a proper way.
And people like Alexander are why so many people bite their tongues when they realize their parents betrayed them, either via crimes of commission or omission. As someone whose father stayed on third shift to facilitate cheating on my mother, this below-the-belt shot from Alexander hit me on a personal level. My father did this knowing that his schedule resulted in only seeing my mother, an elementary school teacher, for only a few hours out of the week when school was in session. While my father committed crimes of omission as opposed to Jim Bob’s crimes of commission, they both forfeited any right to be honored. And if calling out this behavior amounts to throwing our parents under the bus, something is very wrong.
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