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The Failure of Religious Fundamentalism

What Josh Duggar—a marginalizer of women who was implicated in the Ashley Madison cheating leak—should have said in his public apology

by
Rachel Shukert
August 21, 2015
(Twitter)
(Twitter)

You guys, the summer 2015 hasn’t been such a great one for Josh Duggar, the eldest son and heir presumptive of the unwieldy Duggar clan. First, in May, it came out that he repeatedly molested several of his younger sisters over a protracted period of time, beginning in 2002 when he was a young teenager. Duggar was rapidly dispatched by his concerned parents for a good old-fashioned talking to by a trusted family friend who is currently serving a 56-year sentence on child pornography conviction. Then marriage equality—something that Duggar, as a lobbyist for the arch-conservative Family Research Council, had devoted his entire adult career to fighting—became the law of the land. And now, thanks to the Ashley Madison hackers who exposed 32 million users of the cheating website, we know that he spent nearly $1000 looking to fool around on his wife.

You have to hand it to Duggar: he’s learned something from last time about getting ahead of the story. Soon thereafter, the knowledge of his Ashley Madison account (in which he claimed, controversially for a member of the Quiverfull movement, which forbids women from cutting their hair lest they mar their “crowning glory,” to be interested in women with both long and short hair) he released a contrite public statement, articulating the ways in which he felt he had failed his wife, his fans, and Jesus—not necessarily in that order—and proclaiming himself “the biggest hypocrite ever.”

Here’s the thing, Josh: we already knew. We knew it at the beginning of the summer, when it all came out about you fiddling with your sisters. We knew it when you joined the Family Research Council and started opining about the sex lives of strangers for a living. We knew it when you married your wife on television, having never so much as kissed her before you were linked for all eternity, and stating that your religion also prevented you from—let’s see, how shall I put this?—exploring your own body, a claim which is biologically impossible for a relatively normal teenage boy, no matter how much he loves Jesus.

We knew you were a hypocrite, just as we assume that it’s only a matter of time before a rabidly homophobic pastor is outed by his latest rent boy (oblivious, as per his sermons, to the fact that most heterosexual people do not find it necessary to be constantly on their guard about the temptations of gay sex), or until we hear about the next scandal of a sexually predatory rabbi protected by the silence of his yeshiva or a priest by his parish. Or yet another horrific story from the Middle East about the astonishingly terrible things Islamic extremists there have thought up to do to women. Because fundamentalism, no matter its specific creed, has one consistent trait: it spends the vast majority of its energy in denial of the fundamentals of being human. By its very nature, any human being in its grasp is set up for failure. And something else too: there aren’t very many truisms in life, but here is one that I have never seen proved otherwise. Any religious society, be it Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or other, that marginalizes and dehumanizes women, reducing them in essence to the sum of their value as reproductive vessels, is going to express itself in some majorly creepy ways when it comes to sex.

So no, Josh, none of us are exactly lauding you for your bravery in proclaiming what the entire world already knows. Instead, here’s the statement you could—and should have given:

“I wish to apologize for my recent actions. However, allow me to provide some context: I was raised, almost from birth, in a regressive fundamentalist cult in which my father set himself up as a messenger of God; my mother and sisters were allowed no autonomy over themselves or their bodies, and any normal sexual expression or exploration was strictly forbidden. As a result, I have grown into an adult man with no fundamental respect for women, no real knowledge of human sexuality, and no vocabulary or outlet with which to healthily express by my own sexual needs. Healing from the trauma of my childhood will take a lifetime, but in the meantime, I will do all I can to pledge that my children will be raised in an egalitarian household, where they are encouraged to become whoever they need to be, and will be unconditionally loved for it. I am now retiring from public life, but any profits from the fundraising campaign that will inevitably be organized for my benefit by my former right-wing conservative Christians allies will be divided between Planned Parenthood, the Human Rights Campaign, and the Rape, Abuse, & Incest National Network. Thank you, and I hope to never be on television again.”

Now, that would be a real surprise.

Rachel Shukert is the author of the memoirs Have You No Shame? and Everything Is Going To Be Great,and the novel Starstruck. She is the creator of the Netflix show The Baby-Sitters Club, and a writer on such series as GLOW and Supergirl. Her Twitter feed is @rachelshukert.