About a year ago, I wrote of the resignation of the cult leader, Bill Gothard, whose theology and practices have greatly influenced the now-destroyed Duggar family.
According to news reports, the many girls violated by young Josh Duggar’s sexual experimentation were given “counseling.” Well, it is important to understand the kind of “counseling” they were given.
Bill Gothard had created a theology that opens the door for men to systematically abuse women and children and then blame those very women and children entirely for the process.
Please take a hard look at graphic below. This is Gothard’s schematic for dealing with those who claim to have been abused.
Please note that the Scripture Gothard tells those who have been sexually abused to study reads this way:
If a man is caught lying with the wife of another man, both of them shall die, the man who lay with the woman as well as the woman. So you shall purge the evil from Israel. If there is a young woman, a virgin already engaged to be married, and a man meets her in the town and lies with her, you shall bring both of them to the gate of that town and stone them to death, the young woman because she did not cry for help in the town and the man because he violated his neighbor’s wife. So you shall purge the evil from your midst (Deut. 22: 22-24, NRSV).
So, we have one of the most female-debasing scriptures in the entire Bible used as a basis for telling victims of sexual abuse that it was their fault for not “crying out.” The abused caught in this wicked web were simply to be grateful that such things had happened to them because it would give them spiritual strength.
The girls Josh touched and fondled had no wisdom, no experience, no practice in making their own decisions. All decisions are made by the (male) authority figures. So when a male, who has all authority, makes those kinds of sexual moves, the girls have nothing with which to defend themselves except their inner sense of its wrongness.
Many have noted that the only person that seems to matter to the Duggar family is Josh, whose career and life are now trashed. The damage to the girls is simply not mentioned or acknowledged. In truth, females in that system are utterly unimportant outside their ability to satisfy their husbands sexually and bear as many babies as possible. Any trauma they may have experienced is simply their own fault.
I just want to weep. Because I’ve been there.
May God have mercy upon us all.
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