I wonder if they realize how identical this sounds to the justifications used to make Muslim women wear burqa.
It is essentially the same argument.
Odd as it may seem, I’m more often snap-judging women without makeup, or with unstyled hair.
This sheet is one that I recognize (or at least, the verses and the sentiments) from church meetings, talking about how God wants us to be “presentable” and to honor our fathers/husbands with our appearances.
I think partly because this is the South, and because the ATI/Gothardites (who did influence our fellowship, even if we were personally out of the inner circle) are old-school “gentlemen,” there has always been a sense that women were supposed to look put-together and well kept: discreet makeup (especially if you were prone to blemishes or had an uneven complexion) and hair carefully styled in a “natural” way (that wasn’t natural at all for like 98% of the women in our group, and was nearly impossible to keep styled in South Carolina humidity, but we did try).
The difficulty of course was that children and unmarried girls were supposed to be pure and innocent, but at the same time, you’re supposed to be constantly monitoring and improving your physical appearance because proper behavior and appearance was a mark of your spiritual growth and your desire to please God.
The way we worked it out in our church is that children (anyone below 12) couldn’t wear makeup at all. Girls between 12 and married were allowed to wear discreet makeup (concealer, foundation, natural colored eyeshadows, tinted lip glosses) if their father approved. When you got married, you were supposed to be a credit to your father and to your potential/new husband, so when you were courting and on your wedding day you really got to go the whole-face with colors and actual lipstick and everything.
…and then after you were married it was whatever your husband wanted you to do.
I think I talked about this a bit in the Pit thread last week sometime. Essentially, this “logic” is why the Duggars are hitting so hard on the idea that the girls were asleep and unknowing - if they were awake, then they were reckless, and therefore defrauding, and therefore responsible, and therefore impure and sinful.
Updated this to share that the ex-leader and the “leadership” of the IBLP (the fundie cult that produced a lot of the materials that I studied under as a child) have been sued for sexual abuse, including kidnapping and rape.
The linked article has another link to the actual 100+ page lawsuit. I haven’t read it, I don’t know if I will. Just hearing about all this makes me feel queasy.
Feeling **supremely **grateful that my family was never important enough or rich enough to go to these seminars or to send me off to the leadership institute.
I feel so sorry for these poor girls, and wish them all the luck in the world as they fight their families and their religion and their lifetime of conditioning to get justice.
I’m even sorrier for all the other girls who never said (or say) anything because they believe it was what they deserved in life, or that they were being punished for sins, or that it was Gothard’s “due” as a spiritual leader to take what he wanted from them. It makes me feel sick and so damn angry.
NM. Somehow this got posted in the wrong thread.
Josh Duggar is sentenced:
evading responsibility and blaming others for some choices is also seen in our cultish society. Idk if it’s just me who can see it all or am missing something about some subjects.
Here’s where it manifests in our culture: women blaming their own actions, on advertisements. Gamers blaming their own actions on, the presence of loot boxes.
The problem is when it starts to affect law and property rights and someone gets violated by this bs.
It seems the families formed church positions and hierarchy. I also heard about cults in general of abuse of power such as forceful marriage or rape by men up in the church hierarchy. ex" god said I need to have sex with your wife or daughter, it’s a test of faith john"
is it possible to have a quiverful community without anyone having such power over families outside of their own? Say the only power is excommunication.
Also how well could the religion work without emotional neglect or physical violence on children? Is it necessary or could they keep it together or even prosper more without it or with much less of it (emotional neglect such as ignoring or hitting children)?
I found out a while back that one of the boys I had a crush on as a tween is probably Quiverfull, or something like it. AND HE’S A LAWYER! Boggles my mind that a lawyer would believe in something like that.
They have 11 kids, and they WILL be parenting for the rest of their lives, because pregnancy #9 was twins, a boy and a girl, and the girl has Down syndrome.
How would I surmise this, and not just assume that he and his wife wanted a large family (and I don’t think any of the kids are adopted, either)? Oh, believe me, his social media gave it all away.
They’re not, I suspect. Who in their right mind, especially women, would deliberately sign up for this crap?
Hence the emphasis on big families; instead of gradually dwindling like the Shakers, they’re cranking out their own congregations in effect.
And they discourage higher, or even public, education, so the kids won’t know that there are other ways of life out there.
That’s the insidious and chilling part of the whole deal. Not only do they squeeze out their own congregations, they have very tight information control on the whole thing. No concept of other flavors of Christianity, no concept that not everyone is so gender-segregated, no concept that women have options beyond being baby-factories. Or for that matter, that men don’t have to be patriarchs of their own rural broods. There’s one path, and that’s all they’re exposed to.
I had long wondered what happened to all the extra men in the FLDS communities, and guess what? A huge percentage of the homeless population in cities in the Southwest is exactly this - teenage boys and young men who were kicked out of FLDS communities for showing interest in a girl who had probably been betrothed to a man old enough to be her grandfather.
Many of them have been taken in by (most commonly) mainstream Mormon families, and while mainstream Mormons are definitely not without their faults, these men have learned that out in the “real” world, people really do have adequate food and shelter, can go to school wherever and for as long as they want to and their intellect allows, can pick their spouses and how many children they have, and other things that we take for granted and they didn’t see in their hometowns.