[CW: Child Sex Abuse] Josh & Anna 30: LaCounting On to His Trial Date

[OldFadedStar]

34 minutes ago, CaptainFunderpants said:

Someone on a prior thread noted that Covenant Eyes is really expensive, and so in your experience is it the best of a bunch of overall ineffective software options?

 Thoughts are with you in your struggle ❤️  Porn addiction is a huge problem in our society.

Honestly I didn’t research any others. If I went to another one, I’d go to just a straight blocking service I used that was free. It was K9 something. CE is expensive at $15 a month considering how crappy it actually is. like it isn’t even monitoring my husbands computer because he has an anti virus on it. 
 

also, it isn’t really a two way street unless you choose to do it that way.... so an additional 14.99 per person. Since Josh has a problem im sure his account is what is tracking all that Duggar families computers. 
 

I don’t think anyone could really use covenant eyes to track what people are doing online. It just sends an email everyday that only notes anything explicit. Even if you read the full reports it’s hard to tell what anyone actually did.

[HerNameIsBuffy]

17 minutes ago, Jackie3 said:

Are you saying you are certain a Duggar minor has been sexually abused? Because I believe the FJ rules prohibit such speculation. 

I missed it on redacting the information.  This was posted before the latest modbox on it.

[EmmieJ]

8 hours ago, formergothardite said:

Basically claiming they tried to warn people about the evil that computers can bring. 
 

I'm so tired of fundies dodging blame for their own bad choices.  It's either Satan or the devil made them do it, or computer access, or rock music, or women who show their collar bones in public, or, or, ...   They run away from personal responsibility like it's rabies.  

So how do they reconcile that I, a spiritual but otherwise non-religious person who doesn't belong to any church, doesn't read the bible, is unmarried and working out in the evil world, listen to heathen music, etc. - still do not commit illegal or evil acts?  I just wish they would simply say, for example, "we are saddened to learn that Josh Duggar has been charged with a very serious crime against children.  We hope justice will prevail and if found guilty, he deserves to be imprisoned for his crimes."  Full stop.

[EmmieJ]

3 hours ago, HerNameIsBuffy said:

Mass was always torture for me, but as someone who takes a lot of comfort in ritual I miss that.  

I don't miss sitting through mass but sometimes I would like to simply go back to the church I attended growing up, at a time when no mass or other service was going on, to sit quietly and take in the sights and scents.  As a child, when I was bored and just counting the minutes until mass was over, I would look at the various scenes depicted in the stained glass windows that went all around the church.  There were always flower arrangements near the altar, and the scent of candles.  I still occasionally go in to light a candle to offer up a prayer.

ETA:  In times of great stress and/or fear, I still recite the Hail Mary over and over again.  Fortunately, that hasn't happened in quite awhile.

Edited May 8, 2021 by EmmieJ

[J'Lurker]

My family celebrates what I call secular Christmas. No religious affiliations, just Santa and baking and family. I think if your old religious items bring you comfort, you should wear them. The meaning to you is personal sentiment, and it is not appropriation because it comes from your personal history and only you can understand its full significance. 

 

Also thanks to everyone for their cute fluff pictures.

[JenniferJuniper]

1 hour ago, Howl said:

*note*  In a quick google search, one article noted that Ma and Pa Keller consider divorce to be a grievous sin, so pressure to remain married to a revolting creep like Josh might be coming from the Keller side as well as the Duggar side. 

More evil than what Josh did, no doubt because she's a daughter of Eve, and her sins will always be considered worse.  

Anna won't leave him, and not just because divorce is such a sin.  My guess is that there is no one in her immediate family who can afford to help a family of 8 in any meaningful way.  Even if her non-fundie siblings could help get her started somewhere else, Anna will never work an actual job.  Easier, and in her mind, safer to stay under Jim Bob's financial umbrella of protection while Josh is away.  And when he's released from prison, she'll take him back and the cycle will start all over again.

A normal woman would be absolutely sickened by what he did, but Anna will continue to tell herself that it's all a big mistake or a liberal conspiracy to take her husband down.  She'll never face it head on, even if the pig admitted it all and described the material in detail to her. 

[ExTeach713]

2 hours ago, Howl said:

She also has two sisters still living the IBLP dream: Priscilla (5 kids) and Esther (wife to The World's Worst Missionary, Bro. John Shrader) with 11 or 12 sprogs (I can never keep up on the exact number). 

Yes, three (out of 8 total) have left the fold.   Sibs Susanna York, Rebekah Hunt, Daniel Keller have all left the family "ministry."

Nathan and David are still in, apparently (I don't follow the Kellers). 

 

I don’t know what kind of relationship Anna has with Rebekah and her husband, but the Hunts could take in Anna and the M Kids and not even know there were extra people in their house. They live in a beautiful home in an extremely affluent part of Houston.

[amaznmom2u]

23 minutes ago, JenniferJuniper said:

 

A normal woman would be absolutely sickened by what he did, but Anna will continue to tell herself that it's all a big mistake or a liberal conspiracy to take her husband down.  She'll never face it head on, even if the pig admitted it all and described the material in detail to her. 

Anna will believe it is totally her fault for not meeting his every need.

[Howl]

1 hour ago, hoipolloi said:

As usual, the response so far is radio silence apart from a few thoughts & prayers.

I wonder if there is coordination of response among those with the most to loose.  Everybody's probably all "innocent until proven guilty." They'd look bad if they indicated they thought he was guilty and then, for some unfathomable reason, he managed to skate. 

[HerNameIsBuffy]

2 minutes ago, ExTeach713 said:

I don’t know what kind of relationship Anna has with Rebekah and her husband, but the Hunts could take in Anna and the M Kids and not even know there were extra people in their house. They live in a beautiful home in an extremely affluent part of Houston.

Yes, certainly Rebekah has no obligation to help her financially, but they appear to have the means.  Although a lot of people can appear wealthy and be deep in debt, so we can't always know. 

WIth the kids so small it wouldn't be that much to keep them going for a while.  I am assuming the Keller's live in a fairly low cost of living part of FL and the kids are small and not in school so it's just the basics while someone helps her figure out insurance and benefits and such.

Also, we don't know the Duggar finances.  If she were to leave he owes child support and so if that means an audit of Duggar finances to see what if anything is in Josh's name, or Anna's.  I do think if this ever happened (it won't) they would be strongly advise to give her a generous payout in order to keep her from talking for cash or out of spite.  Not to mention how bad it would look even to their own people to leave the kids without basic resources.

You don't want people thinking it's unwise to be quiverful because the umbrella will stop covering your kids if this happens....next thing they'll have people limiting their families to where they can provide and women being prepared to work if needed.  That ushers in the end times for them or something, doesn't it?  

 

[Howl]

1 hour ago, EmmieJ said:

I'm so tired of fundy MEN dodging blame for their own bad choices.  It's either Satan or the devil made them do it, or computer access, or rock music, or women who show their collar bones in public, or, or, ...   They run away from personal responsibility like it's rabies.  

Fixed it for ya!   A woman who makes a poor choice, or is caught up by a powerful/deceitful male, is totally shat upon. 

[HerNameIsBuffy]

11 minutes ago, amaznmom2u said:

Anna will believe it is totally her fault for not meeting his every need.

If she were to honestly believe that in this case then that's way beyond brainwashing.

If she truly believed his depravity could have been avoided by consensual sex with an adult woman then she is not competent enough to have custody of children.  

[EmCatlyn]

7 hours ago, QuiverFullofBooks said:

Someone posted it here, but didn’t have anything to back it up. I also don’t think it’s true. Aside from whether he could find 11 women who would do it with him, he was usually with Anna or at work, and I think he’s too lazy to handle the logistics involved.

Maybe that was the number of women he tried to contact/exchanged preliminary e-mail with on Ashley Madison.  ??‍♀️ 

I seem to remember that when the AM scandal broke out, there was no certainty that he had actually had any face-to-face contact with any woman through AM, only that he was looking for adulterous liaisons.  When he admitted that he had been watching porn and “been unfaithful,” we couldn’t be sure if he meant a real affair or just the porn. 

[HerNameIsBuffy]

3 minutes ago, Howl said:

Fixed it for ya!   A woman who makes a poor choice, or is caught up by a powerful/deceitful male, is totally shat upon. 

Michelle and Anna are made of poor choices and caught up with awful men and thus far have gotten a lot of praise in their crowd.  Anna is such a martyr she's a candidate for whatever the fundy equivalent to canonization is.  I hope it changes with this, but thus far it's not just men rewarded for harming others.

[nausicaa]

6 minutes ago, HerNameIsBuffy said:

Also, we don't know the Duggar finances.  If she were to leave he owes child support and so if that means an audit of Duggar finances to see what if anything is in Josh's name, or Anna's.  I do think if this ever happened (it won't) they would be strongly advise to give her a generous payout in order to keep her from talking for cash or out of spite.  Not to mention how bad it would look even to their own people to leave the kids without basic resources.

I never even thought of this. Sadly, I don't think she will divorce him. I think the best we can hope for is a long-term separation in the orbit of the Duggar compound. But a divorce would be pretty satisfying in so many ways. 

[Idlewild]

Even if faced with overwhelming evidence of guilt, Anna ( and probably quite a few of the Duggars) will not hold Josh accountable.

For them the terrible thing about the molestations and the Ashley Madison stuff was that it was made public- by liberal non believers who want to bring them down.

Anna has had over a decade of a subsidised life with adulation from her army of humpers. She has a carefully crafted Instagram with her polished turd of  husband and staged, well dressed children where she addresses education, cuteness and church and occasionally shills crap.

Her Twitter account is rather different- it is far more overtly political and she’s not afraid to call out the people she disapproves of. She also had a Parler account and I understand that is an echo chamber for self righteous Trump supporters. Even as far back as the DC days she was tweeting about gay people being bad parents (deleted after she was heavily criticised). 
Her take will be that Josh didn’t create this material- evil people did and put it in his path. Her logic is that he hasn’t hurt any children- other people have. He can be forgiven and he is being singled out because of the family’s Christian beliefs. This is all part of her persecution/martyrdom complex. 
There will be no divorce and she will yet again try to relaunch herself to her fans. However I hope this time she won’t be whining that her kids aren’t featured on TV enough.

[HerNameIsBuffy]

Just now, nausicaa said:

I never even thought of this. Sadly, I don't think she will divorce him. I think the best we can hope for is a long-term separation in the orbit of the Duggar compound. But a divorce would be pretty satisfying in so many ways. 

Oh I don't think for a second that she'll leave either.  Just bored and musing about the hypotheticals.

Hope against hope that with him going away for even a few years and her being forced into the role of single mom she might find her inner strength.  I know she'll have a ton of help with actually caring for the kids, but it is to be hoped that enduring the stigma of a husband in prison for that will show her if she can do that she can sure deal with the stigma of a divorce.

[amaznmom2u]

Honestly at this point, it would be best to separate Anna from EVERYONE and get her to a psychiatrist extremely skilled in deprogramming people from cults. No amount of prayer (and I am a semi practicing Catholic) will help her. 

[EmCatlyn]

4 hours ago, HerNameIsBuffy said:

Me too, I haven't been to church since my youngest's confirmation and he graduated college this week.  (Yay!)  But it's such a part of my identity I can't separate it out.

Also, when I was younger and still had infrequent contact with my mother's family of origin there were some fundy-lite converts in a Catholic family so "still Catholic" was kind of an inside joke letting you know at least with them you were safe from God bothering.

(No Catholic in my family has ever discussed religion during gatherings, but the new fundy-lites talked about nothing else.  There is nothing like an ex-Catholic turned fundy-lite to have an agenda with a vengeance.)

Are their parts you miss?  Mass was always torture for me, but as someone who takes a lot of comfort in ritual I miss that.  

 

I hated Mass as a child (and felt guilty, of course), but at a difficult time in my adult life, I started attending again for the ritual, and found comfort in it.   When I met my husband about 10-11 years ago, I started going to the Episcopal Mass which is very similar.

As for Catholics turned fundie-lite, I know what you mean.  One of my Catholic friends from college went fundie-lite, and she was very tiresome.
 

[Lurker]

4 minutes ago, nausicaa said:

I never even thought of this. Sadly, I don't think she will divorce him. I think the best we can hope for is a long-term separation in the orbit of the Duggar compound. But a divorce would be pretty satisfying in so many ways. 

I don’t think she will divorce him.  She likes being the superior Mrs Josh Duggar, wife of the oldest boy, the first daughter in love, mother of the first grandkids.   In her mind, she is the HBIC.  She outranks Jana because she is married.  Doubt she will leave that to go home to live in her parents double wide.  She won’t leave to live in her secular sister’s mansion in Houston because that would demand she would have to listen to some plain reality based speaking from her siblings. She will still have a place with a comfortable lifestyle with the Duggars if for no other reason they would be afraid of what she might say if she leaves.  She hasn’t had concern over her kids lack of safety while living with Josh,  their lack of education, lack of a normal childhood.   She only laments that they didn’t get enough  screen time. 

But I think she doesn't really care what Josh did, as the damage to other people’s children that were abused doesn’t register with her.  They weren’t fetuses, or fellow religious cultist, Q supporters or part of the Trump sedition caucus so she doesn’t have it in her heart to have any compassion for them.  This is a woman that is politically active,  their whole political movement is obssesed with fetuses, child abuse and porn with a special delight in accusing  LBQT persons of all kinds of depravity.  I don’t buy that she didn’t know what Josh was up too,  but she didn’t care are long as they were on the show.

I doubt that she will ever allow the M kids to be examined.  Too many negatives for Anna and Josh.  Why allow her children to have a team of compassionate professionals listen to them.  From blanket training, corporal punishment, to educational neglect, they have more problems in their home than just Josh.

 

[Smee]

3 hours ago, HerNameIsBuffy said:

I think the question is one I posed in the last thread, at what point are they accountable for their own actions?

Not as children, no one expects the brainwashing to vanish at 18, but when?  Should be before children are born.

She has brought up to know her life is the best way, but she does know it's not the only way.  She has three siblings who left and she lives in this country.  If they thought everyone lived as they do they wouldn't consider it their job to tell us we're all wrong.

I think Jana is a good example, as well as Anna....As a kid and sister mom to her buddies I don't hold Jana accountable for following the party line.  She was a child raising her parents kids their way with no option to say no.  I hold her completely accountable as a 30 something where she is complicit in indoctrinating the kids at this point.

Anna - I don't hold her accountable as a 20 year old getting married, until i learn otherwise I assume she wasn't told anything near the truth about him.  I hold her completely accountable after 2015.  

For those of you who don't think Anna is capable of thinking outside her brainwashing I'm curious why JB/M don't get the same pass.  Clearly they have their own issues to adopt this lifestyle, if they had damaging childhoods does that matter?

I'm not being snarky, I think where the line is drawn is interesting and it really forms how we see her actions right now.

The question of free will and personal responsibility is a murky (and fascinating) one. If someone is standing next to me holding a gun to my child’s head and tells me to log in to my computer and illegally hack a bank or something, I start hacking and don’t consider that an act done out of free will. If I receive a phone call from someone who CLAIMS to have a gun to my child’s head, but I never hear or see my child in the whole conversation and it turns out they were at school the whole time, my culpability may boil down to how much I *believe* in a credible threat, which is not clear cut at all and gets into impossible to measure things like “what a reasonable person would do”. That’s where I think personal responsibility is less of a LINE and more of a spectrum, if that makes sense. In my mind Anna doesn’t get a totally free pass, but nor does she get judged the same as any “normal” adult. Kind of like downgrading a first degree murder charge to involuntary manslaughter, rather than just declaring someone not guilty.
 

Part of the brainwashing of fundie kids is never teaching them critical thinking and actively working to prevent it. So we on the outside know that Gothard isn’t really holding a metaphorical gun to Anna’s eternal soul, prepared to shoot if she gets divorced, but that doubt has not been allowed to take seed in her mind. What I find interesting is that some of her siblings escaped the cult, and in a different manner to how Jill did (as someone said upthread, if she had married someone different she might be Anna 2.0). The Keller parents’ brainwashing wasn’t totally effective. I don’t know much about them, do the “free” vs “enmeshed” siblings follow any kind of birth order pattern?

[Mama Mia]

I don’t know if Anna will ever officially divorce him, but I think that step is probably one of the least important.  If she gets to the point that she still, deep down, believes that marriage is for life - BUT - also believes that for the safety of her children, or for her own peace of mind-  they must live apart - that’s ok. There’s no reason for her to necessarily remarry. And, honestly, if she’s still sucked into the same beliefs, she probably shouldn’t. And if she’s successfully grasped the true horror of the scope of what her husband was purposefully looking for- she’d likely have a very hard time trusting men again anyway.  My guess is she’ll be like that Mama June character, with the skeevy boyfriend who wasn’t allowed around her kids- who she would still go see on weekends and her kids ended up estranged from her too. I hope not, for her kids sake. 
Do fundies have annulments? Because I think she’d have a good case. 
 

[JDuggs]

Would JB ever let Josh do the right thing and have him initiate the divorce instead of Anna? They could let Anna and the kids stay on the property and support her in her current lifestyle and have Josh live somewhere else (hopefully after he’s served time.)

[HerNameIsBuffy]

7 minutes ago, Smee said:

The Keller parents’ brainwashing wasn’t totally effective. I don’t know much about them, do the “free” vs “enmeshed” siblings follow any kind of birth order pattern?

Keller siblings in birth order per Keller wiki:

• Esther (fundy)
• Rebekah (out)
• Daniel (out)
• Priscilla (fundy)
• Anna (fundy)
• Susannah (out)
• Nathan (fundy)
• David (not out but Idk anything about his beliefs)

Rebekah was married to someone from IBLP (or ATI?) and they found their way out together and eventually divorced.

 

 

1 minute ago, JDuggs said:

Would JB ever let Josh do the right thing and have him initiate the divorce instead of Anna? They could let Anna and the kids stay on the property and support her in her current lifestyle and have Josh live somewhere else (hopefully after he’s served time.)

If JB has him initiate it he's not letting Josh do anything.  I agree if Josh should do the decent thing and divorce her but that presupposes he's capable of putting anyone else first and he isn't.  If he saw other people are human beings worthy of consideration he would never have done what he's done.

[Peaches-n-Beans]

Just now, JDuggs said:

Would JB ever let Josh do the right thing and have him initiate the divorce instead of Anna? They could let Anna and the kids stay on the property and support her in her current lifestyle and have Josh live somewhere else (hopefully after he’s served time.)

I seriously doubt it. 

If they really believe Josh is innocent (which I believe they do) that wouldn't happen because they'd be so sure he'd get off or was wrongfully convicted cause Satan. If they're trying to save face and brand (Which they are) this would do the opposite given they've preached no divorce no marriage and persecution. 

It would also require JB to think about the safety and comfort of Anna and the kids and given he put them up in a literal windowless Wearhouse I doubt that's going to happen any time soon. Not to mention divorce - even amicable ones - are expensive as hell and we all know how JB feels about money.