Duggar damage: It's about more than Josh and still mounting

[TexasTowelie]

Recommended: An op-ed in today’s Washington Post about the continuing damage done by the Duggar family ethos, apart from Josh Duggar’s child sex abuse-related conviction and its crumbling of the family’s reality TV business.

Two college professors write about the “toxic culture” the Duggars’ turn in the media promoted — subservient women, particularly. Even opposition to birth control.

The Duggars build on a patriarchal conception of domestic life that has a long tradition in U.S. history. In it, a man’s home and family are his own little dominion and any state interference into the family is rejected as government overreach. This concept was originally written into U.S. law under the principle of “coverture,” a British legal holdover that considered wives to be “covered” by their husbands. Once married, women had no legal rights. They couldn’t sue or be sued, own property or even claim legal custody of their children. This principle also made marital rape legal: One could not violate what was his legal property. Under patriarchy, there also was no room for a wife’s — or a child’s — bodily autonomy.

Women’s rights advocates challenged these ideas. Starting in the mid-19th century, multiple generations of feminists pushed for — and gradually, over more than a century, achieved — the recognition of women’s rights, within and outside of marriage. From advocating for economic rights and reproductive autonomy to criminalizing marital rape and family violence, feminists transformed the legal landscape, showing how, as the popular 1970s feminist refrain put it, “the personal is political.” During the ’70s, feminism seemed to be riding high with the proposed Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the Constitution — banning discrimination on the basis of sex — on the precipice of ratification.

And yet, challenges to these advancements emerged in a powerful backlash by the middle of the decade. Anti-feminist leaders saw threats to “family values” in the ERA, and others in policies such as legal abortion and gay rights.

See the Arkansas legislature for the toll, which continues to rise with every session of the legislature. And see it national Republican politics in the cultural war against the supposed radical left.

Read more: https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2021/12/23/duggar-damage-its-about-more-than-josh-and-still-mounting

[Skittles]

1. it is a fucking sick culture

that's why they are repuke heroes