Big love gone mad

Thanks to the magic of Netflix, my wife recently got hooked on the cable TV series “Big Love,” and I have to admit that it has been (thus far) a very entertaining show. But with the polygamy and large families and cultish compounds and all that in the show…and the recent news about that Texas LDS compound that got raided…the subject matter of Big Love seems a bit creepier now. And, add to that the Duggar family, whom I somehow have managed to miss in the media all this time, despite them having a reality TV show and making the news/talk circuit and the wife dutifully popping out a kid a year, with 17 out so far and number 18 on the way.

There’s not much more I can say that hasn’t already been said better by Chez at Deus Ex Malcontent in his post Family Units, along with many of the commenters on that thread who had some pithy, snarky and sometimes spot-on things to say about the Duggars. I chimed in myself, with what was probably among the least entertaining responses there. Check it out. Be amazed, be frightened…but hopefully you won’t be rooting for them. I try not to judge, but it seems to me the Duggars lost perspective somewhere along the line, much like a woman who has been trying to lose weight for so long and keep it off that she still thinks she’s fat when she’s a 90-pound walking skeleton. My fear is that when families like this are lifted up in the media and given so much positive attention at a time when our resources are being stretched to the limit globally, and all under the guise of living biblically…well, let’s just say we don’t need too many folks following in their footsteps. (For more on the “Quiverfull” teachings that the Duggars are following, as well as the crticisms of it, click here. I believe myself that children are a blessing, but I also believe that God dislikes excess, particularly when it flies in the face of good stewardship of the planet.)

I’m glad me and Mrs. Blue…and Miz Pink and her husband, Sir Pink…have a little more restraint. At least in actually producing babies. I’m all for going through the motions of making them while stopping the swimmers before they can enter the tunnel of love. And most couples, no matter how faithful to God, have some sense of perspective, instead of actively trying to have baby after baby just to prove something to God.

We married folks should be making love, but we should know when to stop making babies.

5 thoughts on “Big love gone mad

  1. Inda Pink

    I dunno. Maybe its because I’ve got a dinner roll in the oven myself but I hate to cast stones. If they can support their family and want a ton of kids, well that’s on them. Not my cup ‘o tea. I’d need a constant amaretto drip to keep me sane with that many. But more power to ’em if they want to have a whole tribe.

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  2. Deacon Blue

    Nah, Pink…I can’t be down with what they’re doing. If they were just a family quietly desiring to have many children, I could respect that. But this family is cashing in on their kids in a form of “Hollywood welfare” and they are expressing through their actions and their support of the Quiverfull movement that they believe it is our Christian duty to breed like bunnies. That’s wrong-headed and so far from what I consider a reasonable standpoint that I have to slam them.

    Mother’s Day or not, I won’t sugar-coat it. The Duggars are doing this for all the wrong reasons as far as I can tell, and to try to promote it as a “proper” way to go rather than as the exception is irresponsible.

    At least that’s how I see it. So many kids going wanting for parents or homes, and they are telling the world that our job is to keep churning them out from the womb. It’s like the pro-life folks who are so full of indignation yet never consider adopting a single child or offering to take a woman’s baby as their own if she would only carry it to term. And that’s the way most pro-lifers approach things, which irks me even more than the Duggars.

    OK, I should end my ranting now. Happy Mother’s Day!

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  3. Pingback: Happy Mother’s Day « Holy Shit from Deacon Blue

  4. asimplesinner

    How do you know when to stop making babies exactly? What are the litmus tests?

    This would be a decent time to read Pope Paul VI’s landmark encyclical Humanæ Vitæ… It is the fortieth anniversary of the letter to Catholics that re-affirmed that the Catholic Church was going to stand by what had been – up until 1931 when the Anglicans changed course on the teaching by vote – the unanimous consensus throughout the Christian world.

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  5. Deacon Blue

    I don’t know…but maybe sometime around the point it becomes so big you pimp it out to the media to make some extra cash?

    And, incidentally, I put “John & Kate Plus Eight” in the same category as the Duggars…the only difference being that with John and Kate, they suddenly got those extra six kids by being yet another couple to misuse medical technology with massive in vitro fertlization.

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