Dear Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar,
There are many of your practices I don’t agree with - blanket training, spanking children with rods, following Gothard (a registered sex offender)’s abusive teachings “To Train Up A Child,” not allowing your daughters to pursue higher education in anything other than midwifery or nursing, not using birth control or allowing your children freedom of expression in their outward appearance or tastes, being vehemently anti-LGBTQ, etc. - but making victims out of your daughters in order to save face for yourselves and for your son is something that even you should have known better than to do. You have condemned your daughters to a lifetime of being owned not just by Jim Bob or their eventual husbands, as the Quiverfull movement you follow states, but by your son as well. You have failed your son by teaching him that molesting somebody else is a simple teenage mistake, and that by saying the right words and disappearing for a few months, he will be forgiven. You have continued to take away your daughters’ personhood by justifying your son’s disgusting behavior by saying it has brought you all “closer to God.” You have failed your grandchildren by allowing them to have a sexual offender for a father and uncle. Molestation is not a “mistake,” it is a choice; one that your son made several times and that you continued to allow to happen. Stop apologizing for getting caught and start apologizing to your daughters for a) forcing them to live with their abuser b) telling them how/when to heal c) letting it happen in the first place.
Sincerely,
A Girl With Invisible Fingerprints On Her Skin
