COMMENTARY | If Jessa Duggar doesn’t want to follow in Michelle Duggar’s footsteps by settling for being just a stay-at-home mom, perhaps she can create her own new fun career that she can practice from the comfort of her own home: Instagram evangelizing.
The 19 Kids and Counting star is one of the most outspoken members of the Duggar clan, and she loves using Instagram to share her thoughts with the world. One of her most recent posts is a quote about acceptance, and it appears to reference homosexuality.
“Our culture has accepted two huge lies. The first is that if you disagree with someone’s lifestyle, you must fear or hate them. The second is that to love someone means you agree with everything they believe or do. Both are nonsense. You don’t have to compromise convictions to be compassionate.”
Some religious folk use the word “lifestyle” when talking about gay men and women. This is because they think that being gay is a lifestyle choice, like deciding to eat healthy. As you can see from Jessa Duggar’s Instagram photo, the quote is featured over an image of Phil Robertson’s beard. Jessa’s accompanying comment was simply an attribution to the Duck Dynasty star.
Those words sound pretty eloquent for the Duck Dynasty star, don’t they? After all, this is the same man whose biggest complaint about gay people seems to be that he thinks that they’re icky. Phil Robertson talked a lot about anal sex during his infamous GQ interview, and he made a not-so-compassionate comment comparing gay sex to bestiality.
“It seems like, to me, a vagina—as a man—would be more desirable than a man’s anus. That’s just me. I’m just thinking: There’s more there! She’s got more to offer. I mean, come on, dudes! You know what I’m saying? But hey, sin: It’s not logical, my man. It’s just not logical.”
It should be obvious that the latter quote didn’t come from the same person who uttered the former quote. According to The Atlantic , pastor Rick Warren is actually the man who tried to argue that Christians don’t hate everyone who is different from them. The Atlantic article in question was about Phil Robertson, so Duck Dynasty fans likely got confused and started attributing it to him.
Because Jessa Duggar posted what she thought was a quote from the man whose name has become synonymous with the anti-gay movement, she was presumably trying to share her thoughts on members of the LGBT community. There’s just one problem with her quote — it says nothing about offering equal rights to the people Duggar supposedly feels compassion for.
It’s also possible that Jessa Duggar was begging people to show her a little compassion. As The Inquisitr previously reported, Jessa recently compared abortion to the Holocaust. This resulted in a media firestorm, with Cosmopolitan absolutely eviscerating the reality show star’s response to visiting the Holocaust museum.
“Regardless of how one feels about the morality of abortion though, comparing it to one of the greatest horrors in modern history is insensitive and clueless, to say the least. And the comparison wasn’t a casual, thoughtless one — Jessa had just walked out of the Holocaust museum, and instead of absorbing the scale of that atrocity, decided to make a point about abortion rights. That’s not just tone-deaf; it’s deranged.”
Jessa Duggar is really good at getting a rise out of people, so perhaps the 19 Kids and Counting star should consider starting a blog or something — it would give her a little more room to rant than Instagram provides.
Why do you think Jessa Duggar shared the Rick Warren quote mistakenly attributed to Phil Robertson?
[Image credits: Ben Seewald/ Facebook , Karolina Wojtasik/A&E]