All the god-ding in the world couldn't fix him

[Rev. Rye]

I strongly suspect that even if she left the second she figured out what the fuck was happening with Josh, the only thing that would have changed from that tight spot I described earlier is the number of mouths she’d have to feed. Maybe if she left him at the beginning of the courtship, after he explained what he did (and I’m not convinced he told her “I fingered four of my kid sisters’ pussies plus that of some other girl,” let alone “I’m attracted to children” at the time), best case scenario is her family never lets her hear the end of it. If she explains exactly why, they either don’t believe her or they don’t care. You listen to Kyle Stephens testify against Larry Nassar, I get the feeling that it wouldn’t be much better in such a ludicrously patriarchal structure as the one Anna and the Duggars were brought into. Once they tied the knot, if she wasn’t willing to leave everything she knew behind, up to and including her presumptive eternal salvation, I suspect that she thought her fate was sealed.

Her inaction enabled him, no doubt. But I think it’s important to take points like that into consideration. Why? Because half a lifetime ago, I saw this:



Realizing that 2 out of 3 of us would dutifully electrocute an old man to death just because a man in a white coat tells us it’s necessary for the experiment (with no explanation as to why it’s necessary and no more incentive than $4 plus cab fare which isn’t even brought up as a carrot to keep you in the experiment [admittedly, closer to $40 in modern times, but still]) really puts shit like that into perspective. And, just for the record, while Milgram’s original study didn’t include women or racial minorities, further replications showed there was no real difference.

If that’s true, if those odds are right, with such little incentive to go along, what do you think would have been the results if the entire infrastructure of your life demanded that you go along with it?