The Duggars Are At It Again (Hemant Mehta and Jessica Bluemke, The Friendly Atheist podast #628)

— The Duggars are back in the news for crimes involving children. (0:45)

— Ché Ahn says God told him to run for governor. California says he can’t be on the ballot. (13:03)

— Christian Nationalist Mark Robinson finally admits those sex shop stories were true. (35:08)

— Catholic priests say charging them with sexual abuse violates their religious freedom. (48:30)

— Jehovah’s Witnesses issue “clarification” on blood transfusion ban after decades of suffering. (58:07)

— A strategic lawsuit in Oklahoma could block public money from funding religious schools. (1:09:15)
Audio Interview: 

https://friendlyatheistpodcast.com/2026/03/26/the-duggars-are-at-it-again/

YouTube:

https://youtu.be/gkDrk6zhy8M?si=s09cKHd3gVqR4icU

Arkansas police arrest Kendra Duggar on child abuse charges

Arkansas police have arrested Kendra Duggar, the wife of reality TV personality Joseph Duggar, on misdemeanor child abuse charges, in the latest scandal to envelop the family featured on TLC's 19 Kids and Counting. 

 Kendra Duggar faces four counts each of endangering the welfare of a minor and second-degree false imprisonment, according to the Washington county sheriff's office in Arkansas. She has a hearing scheduled for Monday...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/22/arkansas-kendra-dugger-child-abuse-charges

 

ANOTHER Duggar?!

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/b8oIHRn824o

 

‘Insidious organization’: a reality TV family and the dangers of fundamentalism | Documentary | The Guardian

Shiny Happy People is only nominally about the Duggars and their weird, distinctly American celebrity. "We wanted to use the Duggars as a societal touchpoint and not focus solely on them, because they were the gateway in terms of knowing who they were for the average American to bring us into something that's unknown," said the series co-director Julia Willoughby Nason (LulaRich, Fyre Fraud). Though the Institute in Basic Life Principles may be unknown to many, it's not irrelevant. The extreme teachings of Bill Gothard dovetailed with the Christian homeschooling movement in the US, and the politically active religious right in the US. "I think more and more [fundamentalist Christianity] is becoming more mainstream, especially since Trump got elected – there's this huge underbelly and infrastructure in American culture of authoritarianism," said Nason.

"The Duggar family is not a bizarre fascination. It is a horrifying glimpse of a story that was told over and over and over again in so many different families," says Josh Pease, a pastor and journalist, in the series. As the series argues in later episodes, that story of harmonious obedience flowed through the Duggars, to IBLP, through other fundamentalist ministries and into mainstream American institutions via the "Joshua Generation", a decades-long project to place fundamentalist, evangelical Christians in positions of power, up to and including the US Senate and supreme court…https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/jun/01/shiny-happy-people-duggar-family-amazon

Anti-Vax Christians Are Finally Facing Consequences (Hemant Mehta and Jessica Bluemke, The Friendly Atheist podast #403)

— The Supreme Court’s abortion case. (1:30)

— Marcus Lamb, the head of a major Christian TV network that spread COVID lies, died of COVID. (13:45)

— Eric Metaxas, another anti-vax Christian, has COVID too. (20:25)

— Baptisms are getting cooler. As if that was the thing that churches needed to fix. (33:55)

— You don’t have to defend Josh Duggar even if you’re a conservative Christian. (38:11)

— The American Humanist Association’s new leader represents a shift in how atheism appears to the public. (45:26)

— Richard Dawkins is once again promoting anti-trans bigotry. (50:58)

— A Christian hate group is whining to the Supreme Court about being called a “hate group.” (1:02:15)
Interview:

https://audioboom.com/posts/7990364-ep-403-anti-vax-christians-are-finally-facing-consequences