Saturday, August 04, 2007

Arkansas couple welcome their 17th child



LITTLE ROCK, Arkansas (AP) -- It's a girl -- again -- for Jim Bob and Michelle Duggars, the proud parents of 17 children.

And after Jennifer Danielle was born Thursday morning, her parents already were talking about having more children.

"We'd love to have more," Michelle Duggar said, adding that the girls are outnumbered seven to 10 in the family. "We love the ruffles and lace."

The family's home in the northwest Arkansas town of Tontitown includes dormitory-style bedrooms for the boys and girls, nine bathrooms, a commercial kitchen, four washing machines and four dryers.

The children are home-schooled by Michelle Duggar, 40. The oldest is 19 and the youngest, before Jennifer, is almost 2 years old. The family includes two sets of twins.

"We are just so grateful to God for another gift from him," said Jim Bob Duggar, 42, a former state representative who sells real estate. "We are just so thankful to him that everything went just very well."

All of Jennifer's siblings also have names that start with J. They are: Joshua, 19; John David, 17; Janna, 17; Jill, 16; Jessa, 14; Jinger, 13; Joseph, 12; Josiah, 11; Joy-Anna, 9; Jedidiah, 8; Jeremiah, 8; Jason 7; James 6; Justin, 4; Jackson, 3; Johannah, almost 2.

The Duggars have been featured on several programs on cable's Discovery Health Network.

Among the "fun facts" listed on Discovery Health's Web page devoted to the Duggars: A baby has been born in every month except June; the family has gone through about 90,000 diapers, and Michelle Duggar has been pregnant for 126 months -- or 10.5 years -- of her life.

Two important tidbits:

- home-schooled

- this quote: "We are just so grateful to God for another gift from him"

See, the Duggars are "conservative fundamentalist Christians" and adherents to the Quiverfull movement whose "distinguishing viewpoint is to eagerly receive children as blessings from God, eschewing all forms of contraception, including natural family planning and sterilization." (from Wikipedia).

Apparently, if you cannot create an evangelical Republican majority in America by the strength of your beliefs and the power of persuasion, you can just breed yourself one. It's an unfortunate fact of life - progressives, because of their understanding of the strain we are putting on our planet, are less likely to have a lot of children than are those on the Right. We are shooting ourselves in the foot. Of course, just because children are born into a fundamentalist (or progressive) family doesn't mean that they will always grow up to have their parents' beliefs. But, there is a high probability.

Just as I said in yesterday's post, sometimes the absurdity of your beliefs is the single best argument against their widespread adoption. All hail the Duggars, poster family for sterilization (I'm only half-kidding)!

"Those who in principle oppose birth control are either incapable of arithmetic or else in favor of war, pestilence and famine as permanent features of human life." -- Bertrand Russell

15 comments:

Laura said...

that just makes me cringe. Dormatory style bedrooms? What is this, Oliver Twist? Quality vs. quantity is apparently a concept that never crossed their minds. I find it sick that Discovery has a website devoted to them too. Sure, there's a website devoted to all kinds of whackos, but not hosted by discovery. It gives them a sort of legitimation I don't think they deserve.

shrimplate said...

It's ironic that they have so many kids, since as fundamentalist xtians they probably don't fuck very often.

Scott said...

They're probably pretty nice.

dbackdad said...

"They're probably pretty nice." -- I'm sure they are. You'd have to be to be able to keep a house that large in some kind of order.

But that's not the point. Ultimately, it's not what you say. It's what you do. If just by virtue of the choices you make in life, you are a bad example or are causing a greater burden upon the planet, then you are not immune to criticism. Some of the greatest injustices in history were done by "nice" people.

Scott said...

The planet has no "burden". It's an inanimate hunk of dirt that has no intrinsic value other than what we humans labor to make use of it.

However, if we're to believe that humans, by our very existence are such a burden to the planet and must therefore limit our number, I guess the answer it pretty clear.

And as they say, the only thing you can change is yourself.

dbackdad said...

"It's an inanimate hunk of dirt that has no intrinsic value other than what we humans labor to make use of it" - How very Ayn Rand. lol

"And as they say, the only thing you can change is yourself." - Very true. But that doesn't stop people like you or me from trying to gently nudge people in the right direction.

CyberKitten said...

Scott - Many of the problems impacting on humans right now are caused by too many people chasing too few resources. Large families *are* a burden on the Earth even if they are not a burden on the family that choses to produce them.

Donna said...

I feel my ass is large enough for me to be able to vote twice. So I'm doing my bit to further the progressive majority movement.

Laura said...

As for them being nice. Maybe. But part of me thinks that any family that feels the need to have 17+ children would probably be insufferable ideologues. And I'm SURE they'd be the type to lecture me about how it's unnatural for a woman to not (gasp) WANT children... after all, it's my duty to God and Country to be a brood mare, right?

Scott said...

As for them being nice. Maybe. But part of me thinks that any family that feels the need to have 17+ children would probably be insufferable ideologues. And I'm SURE they'd be the type to lecture me about how it's unnatural for a woman to not (gasp) WANT children... after all, it's my duty to God and Country to be a brood mare, right?

I guess maybe this is why this post just kinda rubs me the wrong way. I actually know a guy who is similar to this family. He's a Christian, like me, though he's closer to what you guys would probably call a "fundamentalist" whatever that means.

He's got like 8 kids (I can't remember the exact amount as it's been a while since we've spoken, and it could be even more by now).

Like me, he home schools his kids.

So it's easy for me to see this guy similar to that guy. A guy who mentored me when I was staring out on my career. A guy who befriended me and my family when we didn't have a lot of friends.

Maybe that's the difference. I see a people, you guys seen an ideology.

Laura said...

There's a big difference between 8 kids and 17 (and wanting MORE). I knew a guy in high school who had 8 siblings. There's also a difference because they believe they have to keep having as many kids as possible to be good Christians (see Quiverfull movement).

And I certainly know people who homeschool and who do it well. I'm not taking issue with the homeschooling at all. Unless it's the kind where an 8 year old is given nothing but a book on female martyrs for her "history" lesson.

I'm just saying based on what I've read about them, they seem to be the whacko type who are "breeding soldiers for christ". I personally think that is detrimental to the children. I just wonder what will happen when one of them (boy or girl) comes home with a boyfriend named Snake...

dbackdad said...

"Maybe that's the difference. I see a people, you guys seen an ideology." - How noble. I think I'm going to cry.

Come on Scott. Are you telling me that if you saw a family make their kids vegetarians, or taking their kids to protests, that you couldn't make an assumption on their idealogy? Or that you couldn't judge them accordingly? For this family, there is not a separation between how they live and their idealogy. They ARE their idealogy and they would probably be the first to admit it.

Like I said, I'm not making any judgement on whether they are nice people. But I can give my opinion on whether what they are doing is 1) good for their children and 2) good for society as a whole.

Laura said...

I also think we can apply Penn & Teller's very scientific theory of the amount of crazy a woman is based on the number of cats she owns. It increases exponentially with each cat. So a woman with 3 cats is 27 times as crazy as a woman with 1, 4 cats= 256x crazy, etc, etc. So I mean come on... wouldn't you think that someone with 17 dogs or cats was A) not taking proper care of them and B) just a couple of french fries short of a happy meal? I know, they're not cats, they're kids. So we'll decrease the cat factor in half to account for the presence of another adult and several other kids to help do the laundry.

CyberKitten said...

Totally off topic but I thought that you'd like to see this if you haven't already:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6939853.stm

dbackdad said...

Yep, saw that. Aw, the joys of the corporate america / Bush administration partnership.