Oh, Anna, Anna, Anna. Honey. You are so trapped, aren’t you? Just stuck in the muck, as they say. It’s enough to make me feel kind of sorry for you.
Anna Duggar, the beleaguered wife of lyin’, cheatin’, sex toy experimentin’ Josh Duggar, speaks out for the first time since her husband got busted with an Ashley Madison account in August, in this clip from Sunday’s “Jill & Jessa: Counting On” special.
“It was definitely a hard thing, and I think it was such a betrayal for a spouse to go through what we’re walking through — and…it was hard,” she says tearily. “It was hard to realize that it was such a public thing, so not only was it a betrayal for me, but it was also a betrayal against those who call themselves Christian, because here we were as a Christian couple and everyone was able to see us get married and to vow before God to be loyal to each other. And [then] that loyalty was broken.”
Welllllllllllllllll. Here’s the thing. I don’t actually really care so much about Josh breaking his vows and betraying Christianity or whatever, so much as I care that he (and his terrible parents) is a judgmental prick who feel entitled by his Christianity to go around telling other people — namely gay people and women — how to live their lives if they don’t want to burn in hell. So when it turned out that he wasn’t actually so great a Christian after all, I wasn’t, like, weeping for the bad example he was setting for other Christians, I was shaking my damn head at the hypocrisy of telling other people what to do when he can’t even manage his own shit properly. You know? Otherwise, what goes down between consenting adults isn’t really my biz. Like, I don’t condone cheating or whatever, but I think people are human and shit happens and work that stuff out amongst yourself, please and thank you.
Anyway, the reason I feel kinda sorry for Anna is the fact that her religion doesn’t exactly offer much in the way of support or counsel for women in her position, beyond just praying to God and ignoring any of her own natural impulses to, you know, leave that motherfucker.
“I knew that my only hope was to cling to my faith, because I knew that if I went with what I was feeling, then I would turn a mess into a disaster,” she says. “I was praying to God to help me know how to respond to this. I didn’t know what to do…but I hoped that God would give the help and the wisdom that we needed to take the next step.”
Hmmm. So basically, listening to her own desires would make the mess JOSH caused even worse, and the best way to be a good Christian wife is to ignore her own impulses and needs in favor of standing by her man. How depressing.
Or inspiring, if you’re one of the impressionable younger Dugger girls like the ridiculously named “Jinger” Duggar, 21, who says: “Anna is amazing. She displays to each one of us what it means to have unconditional love, and she’s walking through this better than anyone of us could have ever imagined.”
Look, it’s not that I think infidelity is always a marriage-ender, but I do think it’s gross that so much of the responsibility of saving this marriage is placed on Anna just blindly sticking around no matter what her no good husband does. Remember, Josh’s cheating scandal came on the heels of it being revealed that he had molested five young girls (including two of his sisters) as a teenager, and Anna’s “response” then was to stand by her man. At what point does the Duggars’ God throw up his all mighty hands and say, “You know what, Anna, this guy is a douche. You deserve better. Take the kids, take the keys, and go get yourself a new life, girl”? Is that ever an option? Something tells me the answer is no.
[Us Weekly]Original by: @xoamelia
