14 DAY TRIAL // TLC may have started out as The Learning Channel, but these days, it’s selling controversy. If you tune in on the network, you will see reality shows that deal only with extremes, from the overly religious Duggars on 19 Kids and Counting, to the shameless, on the now-defunct Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, and the morbid / terribly wrong on My Strange Addiction.
The Duggars have built an entire empire around the reality show, and they have millions of fans, many of whom share their beliefs, partly or wholly – and no, we’re not talking only about the religious ones.
Those who don’t hold the same views as Michelle and Jim Bob Duggar are now using a Change.org petition to try and get TLC to axe the show because it’s anti-gay.
The kissing photo that started it all
The Duggars believe in no physical contact between man and wife before the wedding: Michelle and Jim Bob’s daughters aren’t allowed to hold hands, kiss or face-hug a boy, even if they are engaged to be married to him or during official courtship.
The Duggars save their first kiss for the wedding day, and all other carnal acts for after the ceremony. So when Jessa Duggar and husband Ben Seawald posted a photo from their honeymoon, kissing, it went viral in a matter of hours.
In an unexpected move, Michelle and Jim Bob recreated their daughter’s kiss photo and posted it to their Facebook page. You can see it in the first photo in the gallery below.
This pic also went viral, but what got the Duggars more attention than the actual kiss (though PDAs are very rare with them) was their invite to all other married couples to take a kissing selfie and post it to their social media page.
Many followed that up, including same-sex couples. You can still see straight couples’ photos on the Duggars’ page, but not gay ones and that’s because the Duggars had them deleted from their account / banned from Facebook.
The Duggars are anti-gay
After this, Michelle and Jim Bob also edited the invite to read that it was only for straight married couples, because “God designed marriage to be a loving, dynamic relationship between a husband and wife for a lifetime.”
This shouldn’t come as such a huge surprise, since this is a couple who has 19 children because they don’t believe in abortion. Michelle Duggar has gone on record to say that overpopulation or world hunger don’t exist and even if they did, hypothetically speaking, she wouldn’t fear she was making it worse because God has a way of taking care of everyone.
With this in mind, it’s unrealistic to expect the Duggars to be supporters of equality in marriage and everything else. With all this, they’re experiencing backlash in the form of a petition asking TLC to cancel the show for the Duggars’ anti-gay stance and their involvement in anti-gay movements.
The petition has over 10,000 signatures right now, which might seem impressive but will probably amount to a storm in a teacup for TLC. The network refused to acknowledge a similar petition asking for Here Comes Honey Boo Boo’s cancelation and it had considerably more signatures. It took a pedophile scandal to get the show off the air – just so you can get an idea of how badly TLC bosses want the money.
