What do you know about The Joshua Generation, The Parental Rights Movement, and Shiny Happy People?

[AthenaAwakened]

First, if you haven't watched the docuseries SHINY HAPPY PEOPLE, you need to watch it. If not every episode, you need to watch the last episode.

If you don't know what IBLP and ATI stand for, you need to learn. ( Institute in Basic Life Principles and Advanced Training Institute )

These people are electing representatives at the local, state and national levels. They are showing up and showing out at school board meetings, city council meetings, county commissioner meetings, State house hearings and lobbying both houses of Congress.

Homeschooled, holy, and highly-motivated, focused and funded organizations of fundamentalists are taking over statehouses and passing laws that in Victorian England would have been condemned as heartless, heavy-handed and cruel.

The recent rash of religious regulation and dogmatic decrees are coming from these people.

The threat is real and becoming realer everyday.

If ya don't know, ya better learn.

 

[laughing dog]

Thanks for the heads up. The IBLP looks very scary - a bunch of old white “Christian” men trying to MAGA in their image.

 

[Toni]

I read the NYT piece and intend to watch the docuseries.

I’ve never been a fan of Whatever series it was that featured the Duggars, but the brief amounts I would see on the unavoidable commercials were heartbreaking. When their son was arrested for kiddie porn, it was…unsurprising just as it was unsurprising to me that he had molested several young girls including 3 of his sisters and it was unsurprising to me that the family thought they had dealt with it by sending him to counseling…with an untrained cult leader, to be sure, but someone they thought they could trust. And of course, by restricting the access of the boys to their sisters, including infants! But never in doing anything that remotely tou McGee upon the rights of any and all of the children to have any kind of autonomy or control over their own bodies or lives.

I find that utterly and completely heartbreaking and infuriating for the son, his victims, and the whole family.

It is completely unsurprising that the father of the family was totally in it for the money (and fame and power). And sadly enough, as unsurprising that the television network was also in it totally for the money and ratings with no one at all looking out for the children. Surely they had to have seen things that were wrong. And why are not contracts for such reality series crafted specifically in order to protect the financial interests of the children, as well as their well-being? Why is that not a standard legal requirement???

I am heartbroken for all of the children, but especially the girls..

The fact that any of the children have been able to escape seems miraculous to me.