14 DAY TRIAL // Jim Bob Duggar isn’t afraid that TLC might hear of and actually pay heed to a certain Change.org petition that calls for the cancelation of his reality show, 19 Kids and Counting. If anything, he’s somehow grateful for it, because it only made the show and the entire Duggar family bigger.
The petition was started last month and got plenty of media attention at the time, though that didn’t translate into more signatures. It asked TLC to reconsider the show and to pull the plug on it because the Duggars, who are famously religious people, were using it and the exposure they got from it to push their own anti-gay agenda.
Weeks later, a new petition was started, this time to counter the first one.
In the end, it’s the Duggars who win
Speaking to Us Weekly at a recent event, Jim Bob says that whoever started the petition might have wanted to harm them and was even thinking they stood a chance to get them off TV, but the result was the opposite of that.
“They won't succeed. Our show is the number one show on TLC. We love everybody. It’s a small group creating this fuss. All it has done is give us more exposure,” he says.
“We’ve gained 50,000 Facebook fans last week. God is expanding our borders through the national media. We love everybody, but we don’t always agree with them,” Jim Bob adds.
It would have been impossible for a petition to manage to make such a change in the first place, if you think about it. When season 4 of Here Comes Honey Boo Boo premiered (before the pedophile scandal with Mama June) and it became clear that Honey Boo Boo was no longer the adorable child the audiences once loved, a similar petition was started.
That one got even more signatures and media attention, but the network still refused to pull the series. It took the aforementioned scandal (in which it was revealed that Mama June was sleeping with a man who had molested her own daughter 13 years back) to cancel the series.
Meanwhile, the Duggars have a spotless reputation, save for the fact that they’re anti-gay, which, if you think about it, is their right. Freedom of speech and of opinion goes both ways.
What started it all?
Jessa Duggar, one of the daughters, and Ben Seawald were married this year and, on their honeymoon, they posted a photo of them kissing, which went viral immediately. The reason this happened is that the Duggar children are not allowed any kind of contact with the opposite sex before marriage – and that includes kissing, hugging frontally, and of course, making love.
Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar replicated the photo and posted it to their Facebook, urging other couples to do the same, to post the photos on their wall as a sign of how love really is everything in life. As was to be expected, gay couples also posted their pics, but they were deleted immediately.
The Duggars then explained that their belief that marriage should be between man and woman meant that they could not allow photos of same-sex couples kissing on their wall. And so the petition was started, but it turned out to be like a storm in a teacup in terms of effectiveness.
