​Amidst shocking allegations that Roy Moore pursued relationships with girls ranging in age from 14-18 years old when he was in his 30s, some of his supporters have upped the ante by saying that even if the allegations are proven true, they won’t think Moore did anything wrong: saying they didn’t actually have sex and he was single at the time.”

Moore is the  Alabama Republican Senate candidate and former State Supreme Court Chief Justice, familiar to RD readers from the too-many-to-cite articles documenting his ties to white supremacists and Christian Reconstructionists. Moore is a frequent speaker at conferences promoting Christian Reconstructionist biblical law and biblical patriarchy.
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Incredulous observers won’t be able to make sense of Moore’s supporters while seeing the allegations only in terms of pedophilia (though if legally possible he should be prosecuted for that).  They will miss the point that this problem is actually far more insidious. It’s a feature not a bug, as they say, of a particular subculture. 

It looks like the Alex Jones interview will go forward on NBC this weekend. I am sympathetic to those who think this mainstream exposure will help to legitimize Jones and, at the same time, as an ethnographer I have often made the case for studying people whose views are abhorrent. In fact, I showed a clip from Jones’ show in my class last term.

​The validity of NBC’s choice will depend, in some measure on the context with which the interview is presented. Will Jones just be given an opportunity to create a false, apparently respectable, impression with an audience who might not already be familiar with him?  Or will they air segments like this or this that show him to be…well…unhinged?  Will they combine the interview with context from people who study Conspiracy Theories and help us think clearly about them? Will they explain what’s wrong with them and explain their appeal?  Will NBC use the opportunity to help people learn how to evaluate what they see on the internet for reliability; how to spot “fake news?”

Jay Sekulow has been making the rounds at right wing media outlets (Fox, PJ Media, WND, Breitbart), but Sunday he made an appearance on the diabolical MSM: This Week with George Stephanopoulos. Without his familiar identifier as lead counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), he was introduced as a member Donald Trump’s legal team.

In case you’ve forgotten ACLJ was part of the rise of Christian public interest law firms, beginning in the 1980s. These groups pursued the religious right’s culture wars agenda in the courts focusing initially on battles over First Amendment religion clauses, abortion rights, and Christian education, then later including opposition to the expansion of LGBTQ rights and the promotion of hostility toward Muslims. 
Sekulow was predictable in his comments on the Comey hearings: divert attention to Comey’s alleged leak, assert that Comey vindicated Trump on issues of collusion, and so forth.
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More interesting to me is Sekulow’s appearance as a member of the President’s legal team. With no background as a defense attorney, Sekulow has a 30+ year track record in the forefront of religious right culture wars battles, often promoting the most extreme positions, both in the U.S. and abroad.

Sex scandals keep bubbling up from the Christian home school world and there is an underlying connection you've not yet read about--and believe it or not, it ties into the tea party and the GOP house speaker race.

A lawsuit filed last week on behalf of five women who had served as Bill Gothard interns alleges that the organization for which they worked, Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP), was aware of ongoing "sexual abuse, sexual harassment and inappropriate/unauthorized touching while they were minors," They seek damages from the organization.

According to the complaint, IBLP has closed its offices in Illinois where the alleged abuse occurred, in order to move its assets to Texas. The complaint seeks to preclude that move and secure damages for the five women. Attorney David Gibbs III said the women had been in contact with him while they worked for more than a year to resolve their issues with the IBLP board which, "basically did everything wrong." He also indicated that since the filing more women have contacted him and there may be others that join the suit.

Gothard and IBLP may not be household names but they are broadly influential. In 2010 a Florida Congressional race Tea Party candidate was dubbed "Taliban Dan," for his ties to IBLP and controversial statements statements about women's submission. Webster was the one candidate the so-called Freedom Caucus liked as candidate to replace House Speaker John Boehner.

Extreme Homeschooling Sex Scandals
Surely you've heard that Josh Dugger admitted molesting young girls (including his sisters) and was later revealed to have cheated on his wife. The revelations led to his resignation from the Family Research Council, the cancellation of his family's reality TV show and, now, according to some reports divorce from his wife, a 27 year-old mother of four.

The Duggars occupied a place among home schooling elites at the nexus of two important ministries that were recently been wracked by sex scandals and abuse accusations: Bill Gothard's Institute in Biblical Life Principles/Advanced Training Institute (also known as IBLP and ATI) and Doug Phillips' Vision Forum. The Duggar's were Gothard homeschoolers and they were ministry partners with Vision Forum, which in 2010 named Michelle Duggar "Mother of the Year."

In June 2014 when Bill Gothard, homeschooling icon and founder of the community youth training program called Character First! resigned from his Institute in Biblical Life Principles (IBLP) last year over sexual abuse allegations, he maintained he did nothing wrong, though the lawsuit claims otherwise.

In late 2013 homeschooling biblical patriarch Doug Phillips was forced to resign from his Vision Forum Ministries when he admitted to an inappropriate relationship with a young woman who had worked for his family and been a member of the church he led. That scandal is the subject of an ongoing lawsuit.*

Where are the Authorities?
Central to each of these cases is a homeschooling environment that is intentionally autonomous from oversight and regulation, secured in claims to legal protection religious freedom, leaving young women dangerously vulnerable to would-be abusers.

Gothard's organization offers a home school curriculum and seminars fostering an insular community of alumni that stretches across the country and around the world, and spanning decades. Sarah Posner has written about Gothard's authoritarianism, emphasizing bizarre views of science and medicine, and the complete submission of women. Gothard resigned his position a little over a year ago after a series of accusations that he cultivated inappropriate intimacy with young women who worked at IBPL/ATI headquarters.

Phillips' Vision Forum also promoted home schooling materials and conferences that produced an insular community sharing his vision and, at the same time, had fairly broad influence in the larger home school world.

Gothard, Phillips, and the Duggars represent contemporary expressions of the movement established by R.J. Rushdoony, known as Christian Reconstruction, and share what they understand to be a biblical view of authority derived from Rushdoony.

In this view, God delegated specific and separate authority to the family (exercising dominion, the primary aspect of which is raising children), the church (preaching the Gospel and training Christians in the exercise of dominion), and the civil government (punishing criminals). Each sphere is understood as autonomous from the others, with education exclusively within the purview of the family. They oppose any oversight by the civil government as a tyrannical violation of God's law.

Rushdoony wrote this in the 1960s and it was the basis on which he testified in early Christian education lawsuits, successfully arguing that educational autonomy from the state is a matter of religious freedom. It is the fundamental commitment that drives the work of the controversial Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) (where Phillips worked as an attorney.)

A 2009 "Leadership Summit," held at a Gothard-owned facility, brought together like-minded homeschool leaders where speakers traced the homeschool movement to Rushdoony and articulated a distinctly Reconstructionist version of the characteristics of "Christian" home schooling. Phillips argued for the complete dismantling of "unbiblical" Child Protective Services: "The core problem with Child Protective Services is its existence....at the end of the day, the problem isn't simply 'Child Protective Services to get better,' it is eliminating it altogether."

In the Fox News  interview Megyn Kelly asked whether Michelle and Jim Bob considered that they might have legal obligations. Jim Bob answered, "You know, what? As parents you're not mandatory reporters." The Duggars' decided to not report their son's crimes to authorities , but to deal with the molestation as "sin," addressing it within their own family and seeking informal "counseling" from someone who shared their particular version of a Christian worldview; someone thought to have come through the Gothard network .

There has been disagreement over whether they had legal obligations and plenty of criticism for not reporting whether they were required to or not. But supporters have opined that they handled the issue correctly as it is, in their view, a family matter. Even days after the scandal broke DHS appeared at the Duggar home on another investigation and the parents apparently refused to cooperate.

At the same time, there is a growing critique among homeschoolers, some of whom remain conservative Christians, who see this problem, one of whom shared with me the recording of the Summit.

While sex abuse isn't unique to this world, and I'm not even arguing that it is worse here than elsewhere (though Jim Bob did say that he's talked it over with many families they know and that their situation "happened in lots of them") the view that parents (read fathers) have absolute authority over every aspect of the raising of children, creates a context that can mitigate against discovering and stopping abuse... and which can even serve to protect abusers.

*Full disclosure: I have helped as a consultant for the plaintiff.