Believe it or not, the most nauseating thing that has happened in politics over the last three years isn’t Donald Trump’s upset victory in the 2016 presidential election. It has been the religious right’s continued loyalty to Trump even though it has been proven several times over that he is taking evangelicals for a ride.
The nation’s so-called moral guardians would have us believe that Trump is a baby Christian whose faith is very important to him, and has led him to become a champion for returning this country to God. Never mind that even a cursory look at his Twitter feed proves that the man who bragged that he could treat women any way he pleased–even “grab ’em by the p***y”–is the real Donald Trump.
But apparently some fundies have a ready explanation for that. Mary Colbert, for instance, claims that at bottom, Trump is still a guy from Queens and is merely speaking the way Jesus himself spoke. And Paul McGuire cautions that it would be an act of cowardice to abandon Trump, even if he is a pervert.
The more I thought about it, the more I thought I’d seen these contortions and distortions before. You may recall that three years ago, the religious right and many rank-and-file social conservatives rallied behind Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar in the face of overwhelming evidence that they dragged their feet in telling authorities that their oldest son, Josh, molested a number of local girls–including their own daughters.
Unlike a lot of liberal bloggers, I went easy on Josh at the outset. After all, it initially appeared that he was taking responsibility for what he did. That’s more than can be said for the likes of, say, Jerry Sandusky and Larry Nassar. Rather than whine that InTouch Weekly invaded his privacy when it revealed details of the original case, Josh confessed right away. He did the same after we learned he’d been trolling for affairs on Ashley Madison. I only turned on him when we learned that he swiped the pictures of not one, but two innocent guys to use on his cheating profiles–and thus put innocent men’s reputations in danger.
But it was apparent long before then that America’s most infamous babymakers were the real villains. After all, as we now know, they did absolutely nothing even after they learned Josh had fondled a girl who was babysitting his sisters. While most parents know that a boy fondling his own sisters can’t be handled in-house, any defensible reason for wanting to keep Josh from having a record went out the window when they didn’t get help after the second incident.
As a result, Josh fondled girls at least two more times before Jim Bob and Michelle finally realized they had to get him out of the house. Any parent with an iota of decency would have gotten Josh out of there after the first incident, and certainly after the second.
If that wasn’t enough, we learned that in all likelihood, Jill, Jessa, Jinger, and Joy were told that they brought their ordeal on themselves. The Duggars’ ultra-strict dress code–skirts below the knee for women, and no shorts or short sleeves for either sex, even in a northwest Arkansas summer–comes from their desire to avoid “defrauding” someone, or stirring up lustful thoughts in someone. According to the Duggars’ guru, disgraced homeschooling maven Bill Gothard, it’s possible for a woman to defraud a man with something as innocent as a toss of the hair. What parent with any kind of love would tell his or her child, or allow them to be told, that they were in any way responsible for being molested? And yet, it looks like that’s exactly what happened.
Either one of these anecdotes should have spelled finis for Jim Bob and Michelle. And yet, even in the face of all of this, a number of evangelicals still rallied behind the Duggars. They even went as far as to suggest that those calling out the Duggars were actually persecuting them. For instance, one girl with whom I was chatting on a dating site at the time actually removed me from consideration because of my vehement attacks on Jim Bob and Michelle. As she saw it, I was “not only not building the Kingdom of God,” but “actively working to tear it down.”
This continued even after we learned something that should have proven beyond any doubt that for a decade, Jim Bob had been playing us for suckers. When TLC first discovered the Duggars in 2003, the then 18-member clan was living in a house in Springdale that was designed for, at most, six people. As a result, boys and girls had to sleep in the same room, often sharing beds. They also had to spread out their showers over two days.
This situation was not only unsafe and unsanitary, but also unlawful. The Duggars far exceeded the safe occupancy limits that Springdale city ordinances set forth for a house of that size. Jim Bob and Michelle would have been well aware of this, as they are real estate professionals.
And yet, Jim Bob found the time to serve one term in the state house–time that any decent father and husband would have spent finding a bigger house for his family. He also found the time to challenge Tim Hutchinson in the 2002 Republican Senate primary. If that wasn’t enough, when he launched his Senate bid, he paid the $250,000 fee in cash–money that could have been spent on a better house. Cliff Notes version: Jim Bob put his political career over his duties as a husband and a father. They didn’t get a better house until TLC paid for their current home in nearby Tonitown.
And yet, the Duggars still have a significant reservoir of support. All that seems to matter to them is that he’s a good, upstanding, conservative Christian family man raising his kids with “traditional values”–and that it’s giving liberals a conniption fit.
Then again, this should have been expected. As “Inside Edition” reported in 2015, a former member of the Duggars’ church tried to sound the alarm in 2007, to no avail. Watch here.
Now who does this remind you of? Well, the religious right still seems to be all in for Trump even in the face of the almost daily outrages coming from this White House. Consider what the nation’s so-called moral guardians are asking their followers to overlook.
They don’t seem to mind that Trump sees fit to retweet violent memes attacking Hillary Clinton and CNN. They don’t seem to mind that he can’t be bothered to replace a cell phone that is not only unsecured, but literally can’t be updated–and thus puts Melania, Barron, and anyone around him in grave danger. They don’t seem to mind that he found it acceptable to degrade Mila Brzezinski and Kirsten Gillibrand on Twitter. They don’t seem to mind that he thinks there are two sides to a situation where one side is made up of Nazis.
They don’t seem to mind that, at best, he fostered an environment during his campaign in which senior aides found it acceptable to solicit “opposition research” from a hostile foreign power. They don’t seem to mind his rather cavalier attitude toward revelations that his campaign’s data analytics firm stole gigabytes of data from innocent Facebook users.
And on, and on, and on. But none of that is important to them. All that matters is that he’s making America great again, and making America Christian again. And for some time, they’ve insisted the opposition to Trump is demonically driven.
The more I think about it, it’s not all that surprising that the religious right hasn’t abandoned Trump. After all, they didn’t throw Jim Bob overboard three years ago. So what if he was a complete failure as a father? All the religious right saw was a good Christian man being persecuted by those evil, evil libruls.
In hindsight, the religious right’s continued support of Jim Bob should have served as fair warning. After all, we already had ample proof that nation’s so-called moral guardians are willing to support anyone, no matter how sleazy he may be–as long as he makes the clucking noises they like.
(featured image courtesy Duggar Family Facebook)
