Following revelations that former Family Research Council vice president Josh Duggar abused several minors when he was a teenager, which prompted him to quit his post at one of the country’s leading anti-gay organizations, Gawker reported yesterday that the Religious Right leader and reality TV star also had a paid account on Ashley Madison, a website for people seeking extramarital affairs, while he worked as a top FRC official.
“Someone using a credit card belonging to a Joshua J. Duggar, with a billing address that matches the home in Fayetteville, Arkansas owned by his grandmother Mary — a home that was consistently shown on their now-cancelled TV show, and in which Anna Duggar gave birth to her first child — paid a total of $986.76 for two different monthly Ashley Madison subscriptions from February of 2013 until May of 2015,” according to Gawker.
Duggar has boasted in the past that his family “is like the epitome of conservative values,” and other conservative activists agreed, such as right-wing radio host Steve Deace, who said back in 2013 that “this whole thing called Western Civilization might hinge on the Duggars.” Even after Duggar’s abuse allegations came to light, he was defended by Religious Right leaders, including Mike Huckabee, who viewed him as a victim of liberal persecution.
At the time the sexual abuse revelations came out, we pointed out that Duggar and his mother, Michelle Duggar, both campaigned against protections for LGBT people by painting them as a threat to children’s safety. Duggar has also portrayed gays and lesbians as a threat to marriage and railed against threats to “sexual purity”:
1) The Gay ‘Attack’ On Family
Duggar took to the steps of the Arkansas Capitol last year to denounce same-sex marriage as an “attack” on the family, children, “Christian values,” freedom of speech and even the U.S. economy:
2) Gays Ruining Beauty of Marriage
Citing his own marriage to a woman, Duggar said at a Virginia anti-gay rally last year[]that gay marriage doesn’t conform to the “beautiful” design of marriage but rather represents a force of anti-Christian persecution.
3) Gays Will Send Us To Jail!
At an FRC “Watchmen on the Wall” gathering earlier this year, Duggar said that the “radical agenda” behind the LGBT movement in cities like Houston, which is engaged in a battle over its nondiscrimination ordinance, is an “evil” force that “wants to put us behind bars.”
4) March for Marriage
Here’s Duggar speaking at the National Organization for Marriage’s Washington D.C. rally outside of the Supreme Court earlier this year, where he railed against “the redefinition of marriage.”
5) Won’t Somebody Please Think of the Children?
While boasting about his family’s support for a successful campaign to overturn an Arkansas city’s nondiscrimination ordinance, Duggar rejoiced that the side of “protecting the well-being of women and children in our cities” had prevailed.
