Daily Beast Article About the Fall of Christian Patriarchy

[Lainey]

I did a quick search, but didn't find this posted...that said, I'm still not real adept with the search function, so I do apologize if it's already been posted: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2 ... ement.html

Somehow I managed to miss all of the following things:

--Doug Phillips' victim, Lourdes, coming out with accusations of sexual assault against him.

--Bill Gothard's resignation

--BJU re-hiring the firm that they fired who was investigating allegations of sexual abuse

--PHC's troubles

That's what I get for obsessing over The Walking Dead, I guess. But seriously, how did I miss all of this!?

[thoughtful]

I did a quick search, but didn't find this posted...that said, I'm still not real adept with the search function, so I do apologize if it's already been posted: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2 ... ement.html

Somehow I managed to miss all of the following things:

--Doug Phillips' victim, Lourdes, coming out with accusations of sexual assault against him.

--Bill Gothard's resignation

--BJU re-hiring the firm that they fired who was investigating allegations of sexual abuse

--PHC's troubles

That's what I get for obsessing over The Walking Dead, I guess. But seriously, how did I miss all of this!?

Hi, Lainey!

Info about the Doug situation is on the thread about Lourdes (Hero in the thread title) marrying Nolan Manteufel and suing Doug -- look up; it's stickied. There's also a sticky about Gothard.

[August]

I miss it all, too. I don't follow the big pinned threads on them, and since announcements of big news are quickly merged to the big threads, I just never see them.

[Snarknado]

When I opened this article Ms. Snarknado was looking over my shoulder. She saw the words 'Sex Scandal Duggar' and got kind of excited. I told her it wasn't their scandal but Bill Gothards and she said, 'Oh darn, I got excited for a minute because I thought one of the duggars had sex before marriage." :lol:

[Lainey]

I miss it all, too. I don't follow the big pinned threads on them, and since announcements of big news are quickly merged to the big threads, I just never see them.

Same here, August--they're just tooooo long for me to keep up with.

[JaChelle Sugar]

If only CP?/Q would fall completely!

[Mama Mia]

What I think is really interesting is that that, like the article states, the Duggar's had been really downplaying how extreme their belief system is in recent years.

On the show they have been light years away from the early specials, in the early shows they stood out not only for the size of their family, but because of the matching frumpers and creepily quiet and obedient children. Now the kids are all dressed in reasonably fashionable, age appropriate, attractive clothes - if they didn't say anything about being " skirts only" you probably wouldn't even notice the girls never wear pants. The kids are all active, the younger ones are far from obedient, and so on. They throw out bits about their beliefs, and you definitely would know they are very conservative and very religious, but until this year they seemed to have that as just part of who they were.

This year, with all of these scandals, they are suddenly really pointing out how different they are. I know it's because this happens to be when the girls started courting, and the show was filmed before all these scandals broke....but still it seems like a really poor marketing choice on their part. If what they are marketing is the extreme fundamentalist lifestyle, and not just viewers for TLC.

They could easily have still had the emphasis be all about the courtships, but they could have edited to not have every blurb be about how different courtship is, how they won't hold hands, and on and on, showing how extremely different their model is at every possible opportunity. They could have still held on to their beliefs, described it, and then focused on introducing these new people and showing the couples interacting. That would have seemed much more normal to their viewers.

I find it very strange that instead of continuing on their trend of " we're just normal folks, our life is great, we're happy because of our beliefs" selling points, they picked now, in the midst of these horrible scandals of multiple leaders in their system, to emphasize all the things that are going to seem fanatical and strange to the general public. I wonder what the thinking is?

[Coconut Flan]

First, the Duggars are tone deaf to how they come across to society at large and second, they were at the end of their shelf life at TLC and that's when the coverup/kinder edit stops. Fortuitous timing all around.