Duggars Want Judge To Know What A Swell Guy He's About To Sentence For Having Child Sex Abuse Pix
Yes, in an official court document, adult woman Michelle Duggar dotted the "i" in her name with a heart. In her letter, Mama Duggar talked about what a lovely young man her son is, how he has a "tender heart" and loves to help people in need — unless of course they are toddlers being sexually abused. She also noted that he and his family do things together.
For your visually impaired people, via Daily Mail:
My heart is to share some things about Joshua's character that may not be fully known to the court. It is my sincere hope these things are taken into consideration as a fair and just sentence is determined,' she wrote.
'Joshua has a tender heart and he is compassionate toward others. If someone is having a difficult time, he is one of the first to encourage or try to help them in a tangible way,' she went on, describing how he and his family help others with cleaning and repair projects. [...]
'Joshua is a loving and patient man, striving to be a blessing and provide for his family. He has also spent quality time with his wife and children learning life skills together and going on family outings.
'Side by side, Joshua and his family have built forts, learned how to work on bicycles and other vehicles, gone camping, hiked, fished, and played countless games and sports — together!
Michelle wrote that Josh 'has friends and family who will love and support him in his abilities to succeed as a husband, father, business owner, and man both now and in the future' and she offers her 'continued love and encouragement to Joshua.'
Reportedly, Michelle has not been around much during the trial and word on the street is that she, Jim Bob, and several of their daughters have been maintaining a distance from Josh. Perhaps they're hoping to get their shows on TLC back. The only one who has been by his side the whole time and believes him to be innocent is his wife, Anna — who reportedly believes that her husband was set up by Joe Biden, a man who definitely knows what a "Josh Duggar" is.
In her letter, Anna talked about what a wonderful husband he is and compared him to Ronald Reagan, because of course she did.
"Joshua is considerate, respectful, quick to forgive, patient, and genuinely the kindest person I know," she wrote, before going off on how nice he is to customers at their used car lot, how he talks to homeless people who he doesn't even think he is better than because "they are created in the image of God," how he is nice to his kids and even cleans up their spilled crackers sometimes, like a woman might do.
She also wrote that "Joshua embodies the quote from Ronald Reagan 'There is no limit to the amount of good you can do if you don't care who gets the credit.'"
So both Ronald Reagan and Josh Duggar have done good things, we just don't know about them because they were too humble to take credit and also because all their good deeds live in Canada.
Both Michelle and Anna agree that Josh should not be kept in prison too long because he shouldn't be kept from his family, which comprises several prepubescent children.
On a more serious note, there is a certain amount of difficulty in sentencing in cases like this. How do you even begin to determine what number of years in prison is going to keep someone from looking at child sexual abuse or, you know, doing something worse than that? I'm not sure that's even a thing. We know that receiving psychological treatment in prison drops recidivism rates for child predators, but that's not going to garner a lot of public support because people generally don't want to see child predators "coddled." There just aren't really any good options here.
It would, however, be real lovely if the Duggars and the people posting on Anna Duggar's Instagram about how Josh should be let off because God and Anna both forgive him and everyone makes mistakes were just as concerned about the welfare of other prisoners in the United States who are not white Christian men from TLC reality shows, but that seems highly unlikely.
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GOP Rep. Pals Around With Actual Child Predator While Accusing Teachers Of 'Grooming'
In 2003, Graven was arrested for indecent solicitation of a child in a sting operation, after making plans to meet what he thought was a 12-year-old boy in a drugstore parking lot to engage in sexual activities. He then lost his contract job in the office of then-Illinois Republican Treasurer Judy Baar Topinka. He later pleaded guilty and was convicted and sentenced to 40 days in prison and two years of probation in 2005.
These days, however, Graven is out there soliciting signatures to get Rep. Miller on the upcoming primary ballot, driving her and her family to and from campaign stops and events in her personal vehicle, being photographed with her at said events, helping to raise money, and generally working real hard to get her elected. While he's not on the campaign payroll and says he is just an unpaid campaign volunteer, the fact that he's driven her around personally suggests she knows him and hangs around with him.
At several of these campaign stops, NBC reports, Miller repeatedly told her supporters that they can judge politicians by who they hang around with.
Via KSDK.com:
"A politician is known by their votes and by who they hang around with," Miller told supporters on Monday night in Quincy. [...]
Last month, Miller told supporters at the Moultrie County Lincoln Day Dinner that, “I always told my children that I could tell a lot about who they are by who they hang around with. It’s the same thing in D.C. with the adults.” [...]
"I believe a politician is known by their votes and the company they keep," Miller told a Schuyler County Republican gathering in March.
And for Miller, that company is Bradley Graven. Well, Bradley Graven and Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Facebook screencap
So much of Miller's rhetoric has been centered on "protecting the children," albeit near-exclusively in ways that hurt LGBTQ children and adults. Her first bill was meant to discriminate against transgender children and adults in both bathrooms and on sports teams, grotesquely titled the "Safety and Opportunity for Girls Act."
In April, she tweeted, “The Biden Administration is engaging in extreme ‘woke’ politics by encouraging children to take chemical castration drugs and undergo surgeries, and they are lying to children by telling them puberty blockers are ‘reversible,’” none of which is true. No one is "encouraging" children to do anything (other than meet them in a drugstore parking lot for sex, but that's just Miller's buddy) and puberty blockers are entirely reversible and have already been used, safely, for over 30 years to treat precocious puberty.
She has claimed that those who oppose Florida's "Don't Say Gay" bill are looking to "indoctrinate children" with "gender ideology."
Graven is not the only one of Miller's acquaintances who is one case of Mike's Hard Lemonade away from Chris Hansen asking them to "take a seat." The Washington Examiner reports that a source says that the summer camp run by her family has twice featured Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore as a guest speaker.
It's never, ever been about "the children" for people like Mary Miller, who has no problem hanging around a convicted child predator and letting him drive her own family around. It's never been about protecting the children, or fearing that somehow teachers are going to use the existence of LGBTQ people to somehow "groom" those children for the purposes of sexually molesting them. It's always been about exactly what Miller said on January 6. It's about controlling the future and trying to ensure that the children of today grow into adults who will keep up their grand tradition of bigoted nonsense, so that the children of the future are not horrified by the Mary Millers of today.
Which they of course will be.
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Why Can't You Pro-Choice Rioters Be Peaceful, And Just Murder Doctors Like The 'Pro-Life' Folks?
Rebecca Mansour, the senior editor-at-large for Breitbart and former ghostwriter for the Palins, tweeted out a fascinating revisionist view of the anti-abortion movement Monday night. She insisted that unlike "the Left," which is always burning down cities and threatening people to get its way, "pro-life" folks are just the most law-abiding, nonviolent people who ever harassed women trying to get mammograms or birth control at Planned Parenthood clinics.
Her four-tweet rhapsody over the absolutely model behavior of the anti-abortion cause closed with a warning that "the Left" will doubtless respond to the expected overturning of Roe v. Wade with "rioting, violence, fear-mongering" and "intimidation tactic[s]," because after all, that's all "the Left" ever does.
Here's Mansour's initial thread, transcribed for easier reading:
The freakout you are witnessing from the left is very instructive. When Roe was handed down 49 years ago, pro-lifers didn’t riot, didn’t call for SCOTUS to be burned down, didn’t threaten the lives of justices, didn’t try to stack the Court.
Pro-lifers (mostly Catholics at first) organized at the grassroots level. They planned an annual peaceful march on Washington. They created crisis pregnancy centers. The got involved in electing politicians.
They passed pro-life legislation. They WORKED WITHIN THE SYSTEM of our Constitutional republic to enact change at the ballot box and in the hearts and minds of their fellow Americans.
If this draft SCOTUS decision holds, then these pro-life Americans (who are now a majority of Americans, I might add) won the right way. And no amount of rioting, violence, fear-mongering, or any other left-wing intimidation tactic can change that.
And yes, Mansour has parts of the history right. The road to eliminating Roe was a decades-long political movement that involved mobilizing rightwing voters, building a political machine that allied the evangelical Right with conservative Catholics — whom Evangelicals had previously considered disloyal threats to America — and creating institutions like the Federalist Society that would educate an army of rightwing lawyers, who could eventually become rightwing federal judges, and here we are.
Of course, Mansour's version misses one or a few hundred things, as others on Twitter went and pointed out.
Strangely, it seems Mansour's initial thread didn't mention a single instance of the decades-long campaign of "pro-life" murder, bombings, and violent threats targeted at clinics, doctors, nurses, and politicians who support abortion rights. Oh, and as for that line about how anti-abortion activists "didn’t threaten the lives of justices," recovering journalist Dan Nguyen called attention to a 1985 Washington Post article whose lede made clear the exact opposite was the case:
Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun, who has been the target of frequent death threats since he wrote the court's controversial 1973 decision legalizing abortion, said yesterday that a bullet was fired through a window of his Arlington apartment Thursday night. [...]
Both Blackmun and his wife, Dorothy, were at home at the time, but neither was injured by the single shot, which a law enforcement source said showered glass on Dorothy Blackmun as she sat in the living room of the Blackmuns' third-floor apartment. The source said Blackmun had just left the room when the shot was fired.
The article went on to note that Blackmun had "received a particularly graphic death threat" within the prior week, that he "has been the target of numerous threats from antiabortion groups," and that he had "been placed under constant police protection" after receiving death threats from the anti-abortion terrorist group the "Army of God," whose members and admirers committed multiple attacks on clinics and clinic staff, including murders and attempted murders.
One Army of God acolyte was Eric Rudolph, who was convicted in the deadly bombing of the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta as well as the 1998 bombing of a clinic in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed an off-duty cop working security. He also bombed other clinics and a lesbian nightclub to help Jesus fight the New World Order.
Here's a quick rundown of the anti-abortion movement's greatest hits, as it were:
Ms. Filipovic also helpfully noted that "pro-lifers" have in fact murdered "more people than there are Supreme Court justices."
And then of course there's the day to day threats and harassment directed at people working at or just walking into clinics, or working for pro-choice groups, and the like.
Not surprisingly, a lot of people took issue with the idea that conservatives didn't "stack the Court," which is only true if you define court-stacking as expanding the number of justices (which, like abortion, isn't mentioned in the Constitution). Making overturning Roe the prime criterion for appointing judges and refusing to hold hearings for a Democratic president's nominee isn't stacking, it's entirely "rule of law" and norm-following, don't you see.
Eventually, a good 13 hours after her initial thread, Mansour posted an "update" that dismissed the decades of violence, because after all, those violent people were No True Pro-Lifers (to say nothing of Scotsmen). Here's her brilliant rebuttal:
Update: Yes, I’m well aware that some violent fringe extremists targeted abortion providers. Pro-life leaders & activists denounced these criminal actions, and the criminals were punished according to the law. In other words, our legal system worked as it’s supposed to.
The assaults on abortion providers did NOT lead to Roe being overturned. The SCOTUS decision (if the draft stands) happened because pro-lifers WORKED WITHIN THE SYSTEM by fostering pro-life jurisprudence, electing politicians, and drafting legislation.
Please ignore the widespread terror campaign, because the actual Supreme Court decision wasn't written by Eric Rudolph, so shut up. And golly, the official leadership of the anti-abortion movement denounced the radical militants, at least when Fox News wasn't inviting them to appear on air. And look, Bill O'Reilly never actually encouraged anyone to go and murder Dr. George Tiller; he just repeatedly called him "Tiller the baby killer" and regularly compared him to Dr. Josef Mengele. It would be very unfair to suggest that anyone in the "pro-life" movement ever egged on the folks who printed up "Wanted" posters for doctors who happened to later end up being murdered in the name of saving the precious babies.
Besides, Mansour added, "Other human rights movements—from the abolition movement to the civil rights movement to the anti-apartheid movement—all had some violent extremists," and that certainly doesn't undermine the good they did, now did it?
Yes, this is where Mansour's also asking us to accept that ending the legal right to abortion won't be, in itself, an act of violence against women, because if ladies don't want to die from an illegal abortion, they would just keep their legs together so they wouldn't have unwanted pregnancies. That's just logic.
In conclusion, please, you radical leftists, try to suppress your violent impulses and work for change the right way, like the pro-life movement always did without fail (please ignore the extremists, they don't count). You can work for change through the ballot box, at least if you can stop burning down cities and killing police long enough to remember to vote. Oh, wait, "the Left" can't be trusted not to cheat, so Republicans will make voting harder, too.
[Rebecca Mansour on Twitter / Mediaite / CNN / WaPo]
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