It’s really a pretty terrible week to be Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar.
Most damaging and most disturbing of all, of course, was the arrest of Josh Duggar on two counts of child pornography.
That may legitimately be the worst scandal in the history of celebrity gossip, considering it’s since come out that Duggar allegedly downloaded images of minors as young as five years old.
A homeland security agent described this material in court as among “the top five of the worst of the worst that I’ve ever had to examine.”
On a lesser note, however, Jill Duggar delved into her birth control use with People Magazine a couple days ago.
In this interview, she came right out and said her parents pressured her and other females in her family to just keep popping out kids. all the time.
“Growing up, it was ingrained in me that if you don’t have as many kids as you’re able to, that there’s something wrong with that,” Jill told the publication.
“But there was a shift in me,” she added, explaining that she’s come to realize that her mom and dad led her down a dangerous and/or misguided path at times.
And now Jinger Duggar is basically saying the same thing.
As you are likely well aware, Jinger was brought up in a household that banned girls and women from wearing pants.
It sounds totally insane, but it’s true.
And do you know why?
“My mom had always dressed us girls in skirts and dresses, a standard that was taken from Deuteronomy 22:5, which says, ‘A woman shall not wear a man’s garment,’ (ESV).
“And I never really questioned it,” Jinger writes in her new book The Hope We Hold: Finding Peace in the Promises of God.
Added the reality star:
“Modesty was a huge topic in our house, and we believed that wearing skirts instead of pants was a central part of being modest.”
To each his or her own, we suppose.
But many observers are now, at last, coming to the conclusion that emphasizing modesty in this kind of extreme way can be detrimental to a child’s well-being.
Obvious case in point?
Josh Duggar, who wasn’t raised in a way that allowed him to understand sexuality in any kind of healthy way.
Jinger, meanwhile, writes in her book that she “wanted to discover for myself what the Bible had to say.”
So she did some digging.
“Since Jeremy and I had begun studying Scripture together, I had become more aware of the different beliefs and doctrines Christians held,” the Counting On cast member details.
“I realized that not everyone interpreted different passages of Scripture the way I always had, and I wanted to find out why.”
Duggar says she was given “a set of standards that I took as givens,”
However, as she “reexamined and compared them to Scripture, my convictions were changing.”
This is all fine and normal, of course.
Plenty of kids learn and evolve and grow and sometimes end up believing in things than their parents as they get older.
Through her studies, Jinger “realized that biblical modesty is deeper and more profound than wearing skirts instead of pants,” she writes in The Hope We Hold.
“Modesty isn’t only about what you wear.
“It’s about the position of your heart.”
Looking to “follow what the Bible said,” and searching through it “for answers,” Jinger says that she “never found a passage specifically forbidding women from wearing pants.”
Pretty telling, isn’t it? And pretty depressing, isn’t it?
To learn that the Duggars truly were told — by their parents — that the Bible considers the wearing of pants to be a sin.
This is, of course, preposterous.
The mother of two admits her heart feels a lot more “free,” now that she understands she was being taught things in far too much of simplistic, close-minded and rigid way.
But the change wasn’t easy.
Jinger “struggled” with holding a belief that went against her conservative family’s stance.
“I knew they deeply cared about their convictions, and I didn’t want to hurt them now that I didn’t share those convictions,” she writes, adding:
“[I] felt emotional as I worried that my parents would think I didn’t appreciate how I was raised.”
In the end?
Duggar came to the realization that she “had to walk in truth and follow what I knew the Bible said.”
Better late than never, we guess, huh?
Let’s just hope all Duggar kids eventually arrive at a similar conclusion.
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