This morning on Fox & Friends, Sarah Palin said she supports the Duggar family and says there is nothing wrong with what Josh Duggar did.
“He was just a young boy being curious,” Palin said. “We’ve all been there, going through puberty and just asking questions about our body. There’s nothing wrong with sibling molestation.”
Paul Horner, a journalist with Politico, said he does not understand the reason Republicans are downplaying this incident.
“On all the Tea Party and conservative websites you’ll see them attempting to justify sibling molestation, and I just gotta say, that’s f*cking insane.”
Controversial comments about the Duggar family are nothing new for Palin. Just two days ago, the former governor of Alaska went off on the public for having “double standards” when it comes to the Duggars. In particular, she’s upset that Lena Dunham’s admission of looking at her sister’s genitalia when they were both little kids did not elicit the same public outcry as Josh Duggar repeatedly molesting his much younger sisters when he was a teenager.
In a Facebook post, the one-time vice presidential candidate calls Dunham a pedophile and accuses the “intolerant left” of letting her off the hook.
“The intolerant left’s destructive personal intrusions and narrow-mindedness applied to their chosen targets are bad enough, but their double standards are beyond the pale,” Palin writes.
Duggar daughters Jessa Seewald and Jill Dillard, both now married, spoke with Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly about the molestation. The women acknowledged that they were victims, and used that word, but both say they support their brother, Josh Duggar, despite his actions of sexual molestation when he was a teenager.
“Josh was a boy, a young boy in puberty, and a little too curious about girls,” Jessa says. “And that got him into some trouble. And he made some bad choices, but, really, the extent of it was mild — inappropriate touching on fully clothed victims, most of it while [the] girls were sleeping.”
Though according to police reports in which Jim Bob Duggar, their father, said that Josh told him “had been touching [redacted] on the breast and vaginal areas while [they] were sleeping,” as the Huffington Post points out. The police reports also include allegations that Josh, “had touched [redacted’s] breasts and vaginal area,” and that he “had put [his] hand under [redacted’s] dress.”
Brian Stelter, a CNN corespondant, says Fox News ‘barely covered’ the Duggar story until Megyn Kelly’s exclusive interview with the daughters, and Politifact agrees.
From when the story first broke on May 19th to when Megyn Kelly secured the interview with the daughters, Fox News personalities mentioned the word “Duggar” only four times. Within the same time frame, the family name came up 99 times on CNN and 72 times on MSNBC.
Sarah Palin finished the interview on Fox & Friends by telling the media to ‘back off’.
“The media needs to just ‘back off’ and find something else to report on. Look at ISIS for example. Is the actions of Josh Duggar worse than ISIS? I don’t think so.”
19 Kids and Counting, is an American reality television show about the Duggar family: parents Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar and their 19 children—nine girls and ten boys, all of whose names begin with the letter “J”. Since the show began, three of the children have been married, and several grandchildren have been born.
