Dummy Boy Loc: Michigan

...and I would say that anything that comes from you is equally biased, distorted and out of touch. Your opinion is solely based on your obsession which derived, I believe, from you being abused as a child by a homosexual.

no propaganda please Loc: moon orbiting the third rock from the sun

Quiverfull, Patriarchy
Question: "What are the Quiverfull and Patriarchy movements?"

Answer: Believers inundated by harmful worldly influences often band together to encourage and exhort one another to live Christlike lives. The closely related Patriarchy and Quiverfull movements attempt to do just that. The desire to protect their families from the influences of a godless world drives some to search the Bible for alternatives. In general, these movements emphasize the leadership of the husband/father, the blessing of children to a family, and the education of children in a Christian worldview.

Proponents of the Quiverfull philosophy emphasize that children are a blessing from the Lord, and He alone should open and close the womb of a woman. They focus on Psalm 127:3–5: “Children are a heritage from the LORD, offspring a reward from him. Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are children born in one’s youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them. They will not be put to shame when they contend with their opponents in court.” While some teach that children are blessings and gifts from God, others intend to use their children to redeem the culture. In addition, many continue to attempt to have children despite economic conditions or the physical well-being of the mother.

The Patriarchy movement encompasses the beliefs of both Quiverfull and homeschoolers and emphasizes the headship of the father, or patriarch, in a family. As in any unregulated movement, there are different interpretations of their beliefs. In general, they include the following:

• God has granted men authority over their families; preferably, men should be in charge in the workplace, as well.
• Women’s sphere of influence is the home.
• Women should only work outside the home in context of her domestic responsibilities.
• Single women may have more flexibility in their work, but, in general, are not encouraged to work as equals among men in fields that invoke authority such as industry, commerce, civil government, and the military.
• God opens and closes the womb; therefore, birth control is taking control from God.
• Having and educating many children is the responsibility of all Christians in order to return the country to a nation that follows God.
• God has entrusted the direct oversight of the education of children to their parents alone, not the state; fathers are to supervise every aspect of curriculum and training.
• Girls are encouraged to center their education around their future role as wives and mothers.
• Segregating children into age-specified activities is inappropriate; children are foolish and should not be left to the influence of others who are also foolish.
• The local church is a “family of families”; all worship and educational activities are to be multi-generational.
• Unmarried, grown children are under rule of fathers; although a son may be released to find a vocation and “take a wife,” he should seek his father’s counsel.
• Since daughters are “given in marriage” by their fathers, an obedient daughter will allow her father to guide the process of finding a husband, although both she or her father may veto the other’s choice.

As in anything man attempts, there is room for abuse in the Patriarchy movement. In their zeal to live lives that please God, some rely on man-made rules and standards. This lifestyle can be particularly oppressive for daughters. Being protected and educated under the leadership of a loving, Christian father is wonderful. Receiving training to be able to meet the demands of caring for a family and household will go far in preparing them for the families they may have some day. But many of the requirements espoused by families in the Patriarchy movement are based on biblical-times culture and not on biblical standards. Nowhere in the New Testament is it mentioned that single adult women are required to live at home and either care for younger siblings or work for their father to further his sphere of influence. Often, both girls and boys are discouraged from seeking a higher education. Many adherents believe that secular colleges are too damaging, and a higher education isn’t necessary for a young woman who is being trained to be a mother.

Another troubling issue with some in the Patriarchy movement is their goal to have and train children for the express purpose of “returning America to a Christian nation.” They fail to accept that the kingdom of God is about God’s relationship with individuals and His church, not earthly political entities.

Perhaps the greatest danger of the Patriarchy Movement is the potential to raise the husband/father to a spiritual authority approaching idolatry. While the man is the spiritual head of the family, he is not the intermediary between family members and God. All of us, from the most powerful king to the youngest child, are called to develop a personal relationship with God. Our High Priest is Christ (Hebrews 4:14). Others can provide wisdom and training and relate experience, but no one should feel that there is another person between him and God.

The Quiverfull, homeschooling, and Patriarchy movements are attempts to follow God in a wicked and perverse generation. It is vital that we be in the world and not of it. We are called to see children as a blessing from God and train them to honor God, not to worship them, oppress them, or place upon them the responsibility to redeem the culture.


I came across this description of the movement, and it sounds very old Testament to me. Don't think I could live with it, but I don't think that it indicates a belief that boys have the right to molest their sisters, either. From the legal point of view, the implication that Duggar should be in prison for years for crimes he did at 13 is absurd. Had he murdered one of his sisters when he was 13 he still would not have been imprisoned for a long time. Still looking for information that would give an idea of what therapy the girls had, as well as what therapy he had. hopefully there will be something of interest. Rather than speculate on my frame of reference it is really easy to read my introduction in the Introduction segment of Spirituality. why guess when you are most likely wrong.


I also found this information from NEWSWEEK a left center magazine, certainly not conservative at all.


Inside the Duggar Family's Conservative Ideology
By Kathryn Joyce 3/16/09 at 8:00 PM

Filed Under: Culture

If there is a wholesome counterpoint to the gossip-rich travails of single-mom Nadya Suleman and her 14 children, it might be Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar, who had their 18th child just weeks before the arrival of Suleman's octuplets in January. The Duggar birth was televised on the Arkansas couple's popular TLC reality show, "17 Kids and Counting" (now "18 Kids and Counting"). Unlike Suleman, who was vilified as the freakish, government-assistance-dependent "Octomom," the Duggars' abundant progeny often attract admiration. Their children play violin, their palatial home is immaculate and the family matriarch is a soft-spoken multitasker who gently keeps order in her immense household.

Watching Michelle Duggar manage her Herculean tasks is addictive. We like to marvel at the logistics of life in oversized reality-TV families like the Duggars or the participants of the series "Kids By the Dozen" (also on TLC), which features families with at least 12 children each. How do they do all that laundry every week? Afford all those gallons of milk or cope with a joint birthday party for 13?

But there's one big omission from the on-screen portrayal of many of these families: their motivation. Though the Duggars do describe themselves as conservative Christians, in reality, they follow a belief system that goes far beyond "Cheaper by the Dozen" high jinks. It is a pro-life-purist lifestyle known as Quiverfull, where women forgo all birth-control options, viewing contraception as a form of abortion and considering even natural family planning an attempt to control a realm—fertility—that should be entrusted to divine providence.

At the heart of this reality-show depiction of "extreme motherhood" is a growing conservative Christian emphasis on the importance of women submitting to their husbands and fathers, an antifeminist backlash that holds that gender equality is contrary to God's law and that women's highest calling is as wives and "prolific" mothers.

Mary Pride, an early homeschooling leader whose 1985 book "The Way Home: Beyond Feminism, Back to Reality" is a founding text of Quiverfull, convinced many readers that regulating one's fertility is a slippery slope. "Family planning is the mother of abortion," she writes. "A generation had to be indoctrinated in the ideal of planning children around personal convenience before abortion could be popular." Instead, Pride and her peers argue, Christians should leave family planning in God's hands, and become "maternal missionaries": birthing as many children as He gives them as both a demonstration of radical faith and obedience, as well as a plan to effect Christian revival in the culture through demographic means—that is, by having more children than their political opponents.

Quiverfull advocates see their lifestyle, and their abundant progeny, as a living denunciation of what they call "the contraceptive mentality": demonstrating their commitment to end abortion by accepting all children as "unqualified blessings" from God. They often underscore the point by referring to their children as "blessings," as in their "eight"—or 10, or 12—"blessings at home": language that has spilled over into the mainstream among families that do not follow the Quiverfull conviction, such as the Gosselins (of TLC's "Jon and Kate Plus Eight"), Suleman and even former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. It's this ideological grounding, tying the Quiverfull conviction to growing anticontraception efforts among abortion opponents worldwide, that makes Quiverfull arguments relevant far beyond the movement's small but growing numbers. (As a movement, it likely numbers in the tens of thousands, though hard numbers are not available.)

Often, children of the movement are also called "arrows." Quiverfull takes its name from Psalm 127: "Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are sons born in one's youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them. They will not be put to shame when they contend with their enemies in the gate." A wealth of military metaphors follows from this namesake, as Pride and her fellow advocates urge women toward militant fecundity in the service of religious rebirth: creating what they bluntly refer to as an army of devout children to wage spiritual battle against God's enemies. As Quiverfull author Rachel Scott writes in her 2004 movement book, "Birthing God's Mighty Warriors," "Children are our ammunition in the spiritual realm to whip the enemy! These special arrows were handcrafted by the warrior himself and were carefully fashioned to achieve the purpose of annihilating the enemy."

Quiverfull advocates Rick and Jan Hess, authors of 1990's "A Full Quiver: Family Planning and the Lordship of Christ," envision the worldly gains such a method could bring, if more Christians began producing "full quivers" of "arrows for the war": control of both houses of Congress, the "reclamation" of sinful cities like San Francisco and massive boycotts of companies that do not comply with conservative Christian mores. "If the body of Christ had been reproducing as we were designed to do," the Hesses write, "we would not be in the mess we are today." Nancy Campbell, author of another movement book from 2003 called "Be Fruitful and Multiply," exhorts Christian women to do just that with promises of spiritual glory. "Oh what a vision," she writes, "to invade the earth with mighty sons and daughters who have been trained and prepared for God's divine purposes."

Quiverfull doesn't follow from any particular church's teachings but rather is a conviction shared by evangelical and fundamentalist Christians across denominational lines, often spread through the burgeoning conservative homeschooling community, which the U.S. Department of Education estimates has more than 1 million school-age children, and which homeschooling groups say easily has twice that number.

Quiverfull's pronatalist emphasis is linked to a companion doctrine of strident antifeminism among conservative Christians who see the women's liberation movement as the origin of a host of social ills, from abortion to divorce, women working and teen sex. "Feminism is a totally self-consistent system aimed at rejecting God's role for women," Pride wrote in 1985; since then, the movement she helped create has erected an opposite and equally self-consistent system of "biblical womanhood."

At the forefront of evangelical opposition to feminism is a group of self-described "patriarchy" advocates, who have reclaimed the term from women's studies curricula to advocate a strict "complementarian" theology of wives and daughters being submissive to their husbands and fathers. This resurgent emphasis on women's submissiveness takes many forms, from the statement by the 16 million member Southern Baptist Convention that wives must "graciously submit" to their husband's "loving headship" and the theological works being written by the SBC-affiliated Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, to far more severe interpretations that claim women's absolute obedience to their husbands is the first, necessary step toward Christians reclaiming the culture. Part of the Quiverfull mission is raising large families that embrace these traditional gender roles and teach their daughters to do the same.

Some of the next generation of daughters is responding. Anna Sofia and Elizabeth Botkin, two young women in the Quiverfull movement who authored a book encouraging daughters to follow in their mothers' footsteps, "So Much More: The Remarkable Influence of Visionary Daughters on the Kingdom of God," instruct their young peers to view motherhood to as women's "final secret weapon in the battle for progressive dominion." "Too many women forget that the hand that rocks the cradle really does rule the world," they write. "We should think ahead, not only to our children, but to our grandchildren and great-grandchildren, aspiring to be a mother of thousands of millions, and aspiring to see our children possess the gates of their enemies for the glory of God."

Dreams of demographic dominion aside, what's problematic about Quiverfull for many is the position the movement relegates women to on its way there. Cheryl Lindsey Seelhoff, a former Quiverfull writer who left the movement, says that the lifestyle is frequently one of unrelenting duty and labor that leaves women little recourse if the demands of their lives prove too much to bear. "The Quiverfull movement holds up as examples men like the Duggars ... all men of means. But for every family like this, there are ten or fifty or one hundred Quiverfull families living in what most would consider to be poverty ... Mothers are in a constant cycle, often, of pregnancy, breastfeeding, and the care of toddlers." Women are expected to feed and care for a large family on what are frequently limited resources, and the strain leads some to suffer clinical levels of exhaustion and self-neglect. The work that mothers can't manage usually falls to their eldest daughters, who learn early that their role in life is domestic, as helpmeets to their parents and later their husbands, and as mothers to many children.

Quiverfull and what could be called the submissive lifestyle are ultimately convictions of faith, and many women choose to follow them regardless of potential hardships. This is, of course, their choice, but fans of TV's novel large families should not overlook their comprehensive ideology that argues that family planning and feminism are cultural scourges to be eradicated, and that women's highest calling is in becoming prolific mothers and submissive wives. A glimpse of this reality is sometimes visible beneath TV's glossy treatment of Quiverfull families, but more often it's difficult to see the hard edges of ideology underlying yet another large family adventure.

Again, it gives me no indication that the Duggar family would advocate Josh molesting his sisters of blame the sisters and consider them evil seducers, as several have implied. The entire situation is a tragedy and Josh committed a number of horrendous acts. Whether he asked god for forgiveness is not known to any person but Josh and whether God has forgiven him is known only by God. I am amazed at how judgmental the "progressives" are when it is a conservative who does a horrendous act, and how liberals are to be forgiven. After all Bill Clinton harassed a number of women, had sex with one in the oval office, and apparently raped at least one woman and it was his private business, as are his frequent visits to a resort owned by a friend and where underage girls are used as sexual objects and it is no big deal. What Josh did as a 13 year old is evil, so are a number of things that Bill Clinton did and Hillary accepted, judge them as harshly.

son of witless

Uh excuse me. You people are the ones who have used this incident to bash those you do not like. I have only blamed Josh Duggar. You people are the ones who on another topic have claimed the moral equivalence of a reality show person to the President of the United States in order to bash Conservatives.

In your universe the Duggars are the Clintons. Is your side so desperate to wipe out the shame you feel for still loving Bill Clinton that you need to exploit a sad family tragedy?






Well?

fiatlux

You found nothing absolutely horrific about Quiverfull's stated beliefs?

The phrase "helpmate" in Genesis defined: "confidant and counselor," not trained monkey or docile servant.

But the ugliness of this fiendish cult runs much deeper.