"We appreciate your continued prayers for our family at this time," Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar told Us Weekly in a statement. "The accusations brought against Joshua today are very serious. It is our prayer that the truth, no matter what it is, will come to light, and that this will all be resolved in a timely manner. We love Josh and Anna and continue to pray for their family."
Josh Duggar, a father of six children with one more on the way, has a trial date has been set for July 6. He is currently jailed and will not be released on bond until he can prove he has housing that keeps him away from children.
"I will also advise you that any proposed third-party custodian, it would need to be in a residence, where there are no minors in the home," the judge told him Friday.
Duggar if convicted could face 20 years and $250,000 for each charge.
He is charged "with receiving and possessing child pornography," the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Arkansas said in a statement. "Duggar allegedly possessed this material, some of which depicts the sexual abuse of children under the age of 12, in May 2019."
Former reality television star Josh Duggar pleaded not guilty to two child pornography charges at a virtual hearing on Friday, a day after he was arrested in Washington County, Arkansas. The eldest child of the Duggar family, whose day-to-day life was featured on the hit TLC reality series “19 kids and Counting” from 2008 until 2015, was charged with receiving and possessing child pornography. The 33-year-old conservative political activist — who served for two years as the executive director of FRC Action, which counts limiting access to pornography among its causes, before resigning in 2015 ...
Right-wing media figures had a meltdown after the Supreme Court decided that it is unconstitutional for employers to discriminate against LGBTQ people, calling it "Orwellian" and "a brute force attack on our constitutional system." In one of the most significant rulings for the rights of trans and queer people, the court ruled 6-3 that LGBTQ employees are protected under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex.
The Supreme Court issued a combined ruling on several cases; two were on behalf of men who were fired for being gay and a third about a woman who was fired for being trans. In that third case, R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, extreme anti-LGBTQ group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) represented a funeral home owner who fired employee Aimee Stephens after she came out as transgender. Stephens died on May 12 and was unable to see the landmark decision in her favor.
Despite the victory for LGBTQ people, media and society still have a long way to go on trans acceptance; for example, at the time of Stephens' death, some major news outlets deadnamed her, the disrespectful practice of referring to a trans person by the name they used before transitioning.
ADF has long worked through the courts to fight against LGBTQ rights in every aspect of their lives, asking the courts to legalize discrimination against queer people in the workplace, in businesses, public facilities and restrooms, homeless shelters, and elsewhere. In addition to its work in the courts around Title VII, it has vehemently opposed the Equality Act, which would add "sexual orientation" and "gender identity" explicitly to Title VII. The group is a regular presence on Fox News, where it advocates for its cases. After the Supreme Court's decision, ADF dubiously claimed the ruling "will create chaos and enormous unfairness for women and girls in athletics, women's shelters, and many other contexts."
The Supreme Court's decision came only days after the Trump-Pence administration dealt another devastating blow to the LGBTQ community. On June 12, the Department of Health and Human Services finalized a rule "that would remove nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ people when it comes to health care and health insurance" and would allow doctors and medical professionals to deny care to LGBTQ people; transgender people already face "rampant discrimination" in health care. Advocates havenoted that this puts the Trump-Pence administration's interpretation of sex under federal law at odds with the Supreme Court's.
In addition, reports indicated that the Department of Housing and Urban Development will propose a rule "in the coming weeks" that will allow homeless shelters to discriminate against trans people.
The Movement Advancement Project estimates that 42% of LGBTQ Americans lived "in states that do not prohibit employment discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity," even though a majority of Americans support nondiscrimination protections, including in employment.
Right-wing media figures call decision "a brute force attack on our constitutional system"
While millions of LGBTQ Americans and their allies celebrated the historic ruling, right-wing media outlets and figures were quick to condemn it, calling it "Orwellian" and "a brute force attack on our constitutional system."
It’s that non-denominational, post-Halloween, pre-New Years period again. How are you planning to celebrate the War on Christmas?
Welcome to “This Week In Crazy,” The National Memo’s weekly update on the loony, bigoted, and hateful behavior of the increasingly unhinged right wing. Starting with number five:
5. Raheem Kassam
It’s the week after Halloween, which means we’re already deep into the Winter Holiday season.
I call it the “Winter Holiday season,” and not the “Christmas season,” because I am — as you may have guessed — a foot soldier in the secular army, battling for the soul of the Western World.
Taking the “Christmas” out of Christmas is just one of the many ways me and my Baphomet-worshipping, Feminazi cohorts have worked to dismantle the cultural pylons that sustain this homogeneously white and Christian empire we call the West.
One of our latest and most insidious tactics to de-Christianize the late-autumn period has been to whitewash (or rather redwash) the yuletide imagery from those festive coffee cups Starbucks traditionally switches to every November to coincide with the explosion of aural misery you and your caroling kind call “Jingle Bell Rock.”
Unfortunately for us, Breitbart’s Raheem Kassam has spotted the gambit, and he isn’t having it. In a post entitled “War On Christmas: Starbucks Red Cups Are Emblematic Of The Christian Cultural Cleansing Of The West,” Kassam tracks the descent of these cups’ adorable design from that of a “Christmas-oriented product” to the massacre of Western mores we have before us today.
Over the last six years, Kassam writes, Starbucks has steadily removed the Christmas elements from the cups — scrubbing the Nativity-evoking stars and Christmas pine tree branches, and replacing them with snowmen and snowflakes — which, while not strictly speaking “Christian,” at least “resembles something mildly festive and Western.” And now this year we have before us a “monstrosity” — behold: A Bare. Red. Cup.
Godless joe.
“The only thing that can redeem them from this whitewashing of Christmas is to print Bible verses on their cups next year,” Kassam writes.
“And no,” he contends, “I’m not ‘reading too much into it.'”
As long as we’re on the subject of the erroneous Christian persecution complex, we should acknowledge that there are arenas of more consequence than vessels for eggnog lattes where this fallacy plays out.
To wit: the three presidential candidates who have worked most diligently to position themselves as our nation’s last best hope for a Christian theocracy — Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee, and Bobby Jindal — will be attending the National Religious Liberties Conference this weekend, in an apparent effort to shore up their support among far-right evangelical Christians.
As if any of them needed to establish their bonafides with this lot.
In the last debate, Jindal made clear who his base was, advising his supporters that “We believe that the tomb is open,” heralding a new day for the country he wants to lead. Woe to any non-Christian Americans living under President Jindal, who made “religious liberty” one of the early touchstones of his campaign for the White House. (You have the liberty to follow Jindal’s religion, you see.)
[Swanson] wants the government to apply Old Testament law in all matters, thinks birth control turns women’s uteruses into “graveyards for lots and lots of little babies,” spoke up for Uganda’s “kill-the-gays” bill, sees constant threats to recruit his daughter to become a lesbian from Disney movies and Girl Scout cookies, and describes homosexuality as a satanic “disease” that causes natural disasters.
This is the guy the GOP contenders want in their corner — but I guess they need to blame natural disasters on something.
Conservative radio shock jock and Guinness record holder for most violations of Godwin’s Law, Michael Savage, has never been one for subtlety or sanity. And he’s made some remarks recently, which are basically a vintage Savage roundup of his laziest and looniest historical comparisons and lowest possible blows.
He refers to President Obama as “this thing in the White House,” and reiterated his familiar talking points: namely, that we are living in a “dictatorship,” and that “Nazis Nazis Nazis Nazis Nazis Nazis.” (Or something like that.)
His latest rant is in fact only notable because the radio host can now be seen, as well as heard. Joining NewsmaxTV’s Steve Malzberg for a video gab session, Savage promoted his new book Government Zero, which he says is “selling like hotcakes” — despite the fact that “a very big figure in the media” informed Savage that he has been “blacklisted.”
During the interview, Savage called for Americans to stand up against the “radical, insane leftwing agenda,” and declared that we need to convene a Nuremberg-style trial — a “Wichita People’s Trial in America” — to try President “Barry” for his crimes against this country.
Savage even goes off on an extended rant against the… oh, you know what? You can watch it yourself.
It’s been some time since Tony Perkins graced this page. Perkins, you might recall, is the president of the Family Research Council (FRC), a lobbying group which “often makes false claims about the LGBT community based on discredited research and junk science,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. The fact that the FRC has argued that gay people are sexual predators, while also employing degenerate reality star Josh Duggar as their executive director, ought to give them an occasion for a little introspection — but their campaign continues unabated.
supporters to help them stop “sexual brainwashing of our children by our government” and thwart Obama’s plan “to get as many American children into the funnel of the sexual revolution as possible and make sure there’s no possible escape.”
“We cannot stand by and allow the President to force his radical sexual agenda on our children,” Perkins says in the letter, which also includes a glossary of definitions LGBTQ terms packaged as “offensive material.”
You can read more of excerpts from the letter here.
Hungry for a victory in a year that marked the legalization of same-sex marriage nationwide, right-wing commentators, conservative Christians, and Republican opponents of the proposition (including Texas governor Greg Abbot and his lieutenant governor Dan Patrick) proceeded to giddily jump on HERO’s corpse.
Patrick told reporters that the measure’s 61-to-39-percent loss showed that “liberal, leftist ideas of the Democrats — led by this mayor and led by Hillary Clinton are going to be rejected,” and that the vote “had nothing to do with equal rights.”
Sean Hannity repeated the myth of the “bathroom bill” propagated by the proposition’s opponents on his Wednesday radio show, saying that had it passed, it would have “forced” girls “to share bathrooms and showers with biological males who identify themselves as female.” Audio below courtesy of Media Matters:
And American Family Association spokesperson Bryan Fischer, presumably frothing with glee, declared that the defeat of the “gender-twisting ordinance” (as he characterized it) was a signal that “America isn’t dead yet,” but cautioned that efforts like HERO, which “are falsely advertised as ‘equality’ bills… when they are the exact opposite” should be “a reminder that America must choose between the homosexual agenda and religious liberty because we cannot have both.”
A New York Times editorial, criticizing the hateful rhetoric of HERO’s opponents, offers a succinct reply: “In time, the bigots are destined to lose.”
