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’19 Kids And Counting’: How Duggars Helped Raise Money for LGBT Youth

By Treva Bowdoin
Published on: 14:57 PST, Nov 28, 2014

The stars of 19 Kids and Counting just played a part in raising a large sum of money for LGBT youth. However, Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar haven’t had a change of heart about homosexuality — they unwittingly played a part in helping a LGBT charity by discriminating against members of the LGBT community.

As the Inquisitr previously reported, Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar campaigned hard against a Fayetteville, Arkansas civil rights ordinance aimed at protecting LGBT citizens from discrimination. According to the Arkansas Times, the 19 Kids and Counting stars helped to raise $10,000 to fight the ordinance. Michelle Duggar also tried a little fear-mongering by recording a robocall in which she equated transgender people with child predators.

Now Scott Wooledge of Memeograph Studios has crafted a few responses to the Duggars’ efforts, and you can see one of them below.

Lucies Place

Images like this one have been making the rounds on social media, and they’ve already helped to raise thousands of dollars for Lucie’s Place, an organization in Little Rock, Arkansas that helps homeless LGBT youth.

According to The Stranger, Wooledge, a social media consultant and gay rights activist, also encouraged his Twitter followers to help him hijack the #DefendtheDuggars hashtag. Wooledge explained how he came up with the idea to use the hashtag to help raise money for Lucie’s Place.

“I hadn’t really even heard about the Duggars until someone started that Change.org petition to get TLC to take them off the air. A petition isn’t going to get their show canceled, so I looked around online trying to find something tangible that we could do with this anger.”

The Change.org petition in question was created in response to Michelle Duggar’s robocall. It also mentions Josh Duggar’s position with the Family Research Council, an organization that has been labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The petition has been around for awhile, but it didn’t get much media attention until Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar started removing photos of gay and lesbian couples from their family’s Facebook page.

As the Inquisitr previously reported, the 19 Kids and Counting stars recently issued a “kissing challenge” to their Facebook fans. Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar posted a photo of themselves sharing a smooch, and they asked married couples to share their own kissing snapshots on the Facebook page. LGBT couples tried to join the social media lovefest, but many of their photos were deleted from the post. In response, members of the LGBT community started signing the petition asking TLC to take 19 Kids and Counting off the air. It currently has over 171,000 signatures.

The #DefendtheDuggars hashtag was created by 19 Kids and Counting fans in response to the petition. However, partly because of Scott Wooledge’s Twitter hijacking effort, many of the tweets accompanying the hashtag are not pro-Duggar.

Wooledge explained why the anti-Duggar crowd should donate to Lucie’s Place, which had an operating budget of just $7,500 last year.

“If the Duggars are going to do 10K worth of damage to LGBT people in Arkansas, let’s do 10K worth of repair. I’m only asking people to contribute $5 or $20 each. It isn’t much. That’s something you can do. Lucie’s Place helps LGBT homeless kids with counseling, they help them with prepaid cell phones, they give them bus passes, job training. So you can sign an online petition or you can donate $10 and literally put a bus pass in the hands of a homeless gay kid.”

That Fayetteville ordinance that Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar spent $10,000 fighting was approved, anyway. However, the Fayetteville Flyer reports that the Chamber of Commerce is opposing the law and encouraging citizens to vote to repeal it in a December 9 special election. Mayor Lioneld Jordan stated that he was “disappointed in the announced decision to work for repeal of the ordinance.” This is certainly bad news for LGBT citizens, but Wooledge’s efforts are paying off big time for Lucie’s Place — his campaign has helped to raise over $23,000 for the organization.

19 Kids and Counting stars Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar thought they were aiding the citizens of Arkansas by opposing that anti-discrimination ordinance, and it turns out that they were right. Sometimes life just works in mysterious ways.

[Image credit: Duggar Family Facebook]

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