To Josh Duggar, from a secular academic, on staying Christian

But because I (and other members of the reading and viewing public) have already heard your confession, let’s just lay out on the table what we all know: you’ve publicly confessed to molesting young girls (including, but not exclusively, your sisters) when you were a minor and to viewing pornography and cheating on your wife after you passed the age of majority. I’ll simply let the confessions speak for themselves. I’m inclined to take your wife’s side, of course, but since she hasn’t said anything, I’m disinclined to put words into her mouth. I’m not particularly interested in psychoanalyzing you either – I am, after all, a geographer, not a psychologist – and I find the debate about whether or not you are a pedophile and a pervert completely uninteresting. On the family values angle, I have an entire dissertation chapter on Cantonese-speaking Protestant involvement in movements to oppose same-sex marriage, transgender rights, and alternative kinship structures; instead of framing my analysis on whether I like their politics or not, I simply trace how they follow through on their own ideological doctrines in public space and leave the judging to my readers, some of whom are very sympathetic and others of whom are quite critical. In other words, I have no interest in judging the merits of your social conservatism, and I will not engage in speculation about the correlation between your sexual practices and your politics. We will simply leave it at the fact that you have a well-documented public record of what secular psychoanalysts like Freud, Lacan, and Žižek have called ‘sexual perversion’ – that is, you can’t help but act out in real time and space what you’re fantasizing about in your head – and not speculate on any of your intentions, personal genealogy, family genogram, and whatever else the tabloid mill has seen fit to generate.