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The Duggar Family Chooses New Letter, Continues to Outbreed You
By Lilit Marcus / October 9, 2009
For those of you as-yet-unaware of the Duggar family, they are a rapidly-expanding clan of fundamentalist Christians and reality stars based in Arkansas. They are also the future.
When Jim-Bob Duggar and Michelle Ruark got married, they were a typical Southern Christian couple. They had a few kids, and then Michelle suffered a miscarriage. Their doctor told them that Michelle’s miscarriage was caused by their use of birth control pills in the past. Saddened and horrified, they then vowed to eschew all forms of family planning and let the Lord choose how many children they would have. [The Duggars are reportedly followers of the ultra-evangelical Quiverfull movement, but they deny it when the cameras are on.] Now, they’re expecting their nineteenth – yes, you read that correctly – child in the spring. Each of those children has been given a name that starts with the letter J, for continuity purposes. These names include the ordinary (Jennifer, James, Jill), the oddly repetitive (Jana, Johannah, Joy-Anna), the painfully old-fashioned (Jeremiah and Jedidiah, who are twins), and the just plain mean (Jinger).Â
Last night, the Duggars, veteran parents, became first-time grandparents. Their oldest son Josh, who married Anna Keller last year after a "courtship" that allowed handholding but no kissing or going anywhere without a chaperone, is now a dad. Anna gave birth to a daughter last night. The child, whose younger aunt or uncle is due around April 2010, was given a unique and rare privilege – a name that starts with a letter other than J. The new addition, Mackynzie Renee, will be the subject of her very own special episode of the Duggars’ TLC reality series, 18 Kids and Counting, next week.
Why, you may ask, is this news? It’s news because they’re outbreeding us. I may dislike kids, but every time I hear about the Duggars popping out another sprog I start thinking I should procreate just to balance them out. Despite my dislike of their lifestyle, the Duggars seem like pretty nice people. They remind me of a lot of the evangelicals I grew up around in the South. To be honest, they’re probably more fond of Jews than they are of, say, Catholics. That’s not to say I’d like to strap on a prairie dress and join their clan – they adhew strictly to gender roles, eat tons of processed food, don’t believe in evolution, and are homophobic. [Side note: one of my favorite games during an episode of 18 Kids and Counting is trying to guess which kid is gay. I mean, look - statistically speaking, the odds say there's at least one or two. I have my suspicions.] There are plenty of reasons to have a child, but building an army of automatons for Jesus shouldn’t be one of them. Are the Duggars, with their apparent child hoarding tendencies, better or worse than my yuppie friends who spoil their only children with $27 a can organic baby food and handmade satin onesies? Perhaps part of the national fascination with the Duggars, the Gosselins, Octo-Mom and the rest is that they are the result of a country who worships childrearing to the point of fetishization. When we praise people for simply giving birth, what is there to discourage them from stopping? When we love watching outsized families on TV so much that a woman willingly implants herself with nine fetuses in the hopes not of having a happy family but landing a lucrative reality TV contract, what’s to stop anyone else from having the same idea? When America finally tires of the let’s-stare-at-these-huge-families craze, what will happen to the kids who were conceived solely to become breadwinners for their parents? Something tells me we’ll wind up with a lot of children in therapy as they learn how to be regular people without cameras around and new, cute siblings at the ready.
Maybe, instead of trying to force my uterus to compete with Michelle Duggar’s, I should just wait for some of the kids to jump ship. Hey, little Jezebel or Jehosophat: if you ever want to run away to New York City and become an evil secular liberal, give me a call. There’s a couch – and a barstool – with your name on it.
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(1) America was founded on the separation of church and state, and the freedom of religion, and the lack of an entrenched nationality or culture. If England or Iraq wanted to claim Jews as foreigners, I wouldn’t argue, and if they denied Jews suffrage, I wouldn’t mutter a word in protest. But America can do no such thing, since it was founded as a nation of immigrants with no history or past. See also George Washington’s letter to the Touro Synagogue:Â http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Letter_to_Touro_Synagogue
(2) Plenty of  Jews fought (and even died) in the Revolutionary and Civil wars. So when you say, "It was OUR [non-Jewish] people who fought and died for it", you simply evince an ignorance of history. If you want to say that Jews are foreigners nevertheless, and ignore their contribution to America (as Hitler ignored the many Jews who fought and died for Germany in WWI), that’s your prerogative, but ignoring a contribution as inconsequential is not the same as historical revisionism, denying that contribution. You have the right to be an ungrateful boor, but you have no right to revise history as if you’re Winston from Nineteen-Eighty-Four.
Oh, and by the way: Aryans are from Iran/Persia (and India, which the Aryans conquered), and even if Germans were Aryan (which they’re not), the British (who populated America – George Washington presumably had a British accent) were not Germans.Â
Mike – Â From the Duggar’s website:
"Then, Michelle went back on the pill, but she conceived and had a miscarriage. At that point they talked with a Christian medical doctor and read the fine print in the contraceptives package. They found that while taking the pill you can get pregnant and then miscarry. They were grieved! They were Christians! They were pro-life! They realized that their selfish actions had taken the life of their child … They asked God to bless them with as many children as He saw fit in His timing. Right after that Michelle got pregnant with twins!"
It wasn’t medical science, it was a "Christian doctor" giving a diagnosis based on his own politics. Â Taking birth control pills does not cause a miscarriage — they can only prevent pregnancy from happening in the first place. Â So Michelle and Jim were "selfish" for daring to practice family planning, and Michelle had to give up all reproductive control in order to atone for it.
This really isn’t an academic issue. Â I’m just saying, the whole thing gives me a bad vibe. Â That’s all. Â Â
Actually, as far as we read in Lilit’s synopsis, we never read any mention of G-d’s providence over the miscarriage. Rather, we read that the doctor declared the miscarriage was for purely scientific reasons – viz. the birth control – and subsequently the couple decided to leave the number of children birthed up to G-d.
So the miscarriage was attributed solely to medical science, and G-d was granted jurisdiction only over how many children would be birthed in the absence of birth control. I don’t agree with this attitude, but one must admit that regarding miscarriage, they relied wholly and solely on medical science, and that they attributed Divine Providence only to one specific area – viz. children birthed in the absence of birth control – and even that was only after medical science had first rendered a verdict. As I said, credit is due where credit is due.
Oh, goodness. Â I think I just peed with laughter.
I’ve also had an ongoing … what’s the word … fascination with the Duggars. Â Once every six months or so I remember that they exist and drop in on their website to see how their numbers have risen (although I refuse to watch the TV show. Â I’m convinced reality TV is causing cancer). Â I always end up re-reading their manifesto, which breaks my heart. Â There’s the line that basically goes: Â We used birth control, so G-d made us miscarry. Â In fundamental circles, it seems that divine wrath does a lot of playing out through women’s bodies, particularly their reproductive systems. Â And in order to repent, those women take one (or nineteen) for the team by giving up control — in Michelle Duggar’s case, reproductive control — of their bodies. Â
http://www.lewdmilla.com
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