Duggar daughter blames the Holocaust on evolution, then compares it to abortion

Jessa Duggar, the young evangelical reality star, stirred up controversy on Instagram with an antiabortion comment

Published September 30, 2014 5:55PM (EDT)

The Duggar family                            (Beth Hall/Discovery)
The Duggar family (Beth Hall/Discovery)

The Duggar family, stars of the TLC reality series "19 Kids & Counting," have never been shy about their religious or political views. Parents Jim Bob and Michelle oppose contraception and abortion, and they consider evolution a "fallacy." Michelle recently launched a hateful, transphobic campaign in the family's home state of Arkansas and has said some troubling things about physical modesty in the past. The Duggars are conservative, to understate it.

So it's no surprise, then, that Jessa Duggar, Jim Bob and Michelle's 21-year-old daughter, found a way to tie together many of the extreme conservative beliefs she's developed over the course of her life, connecting dots between creationism, reproductive choice and the Holocaust. After a recent visit to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., Duggar posted a lengthy comment to Instagram in which she first traced the roots of ethnic cleansing to the theory of evolution, then went one step further and likened abortion to the Holocaust:

"I walked through the Holocaust Museum again today... very sobering," Duggar wrote. "Millions of innocents denied the most basic and fundamental of all rights -- their right to life. One human destroying the life of another deemed 'less than human.' Racism, stemming from the evolutionary idea that man came from something less than human; that some people groups are 'more evolved' and others 'less evolved.'" She went on:

So they're murdered. Slaughtered. Kids with Down syndrome or other disabilities. The sickly. The elderly. The sanctity of human life varies not in sickness or health, poverty or wealth, elderly or pre-born, little or lots of melanin [making you darker or lighter skinned], or any other factor. " ... May we never sit idly by and allow such an atrocity to happen again. Not this generation. We must be a voice for those who cannot speak up for themselves. Because EVERY LIFE IS PRECIOUS. #ProLife

Duggar's post promptly elicited outrage, with a number of commenters criticizing her for attaching a political agenda to historical tragedy. "While your pro-life viewpoints are totally valid and respectable, the fact that you would even think to make this comparison is absolutely dehumanizing to those involved in the Holocaust, and beyond disrespectful to all women, not to mention the ones who have actually had to choose to go through the difficult process of abortion," one commenter wrote. Another added, a bit more bluntly, "For you to take something so horrific and tragic like the holocaust and make it some hoe about your religious beliefs is disgusting."

This certainly isn't the first time a person has compared abortion to the Holocaust, nor is it the first time a Duggar has conflated the two; at an antiabortion rally in Texas last year, Michelle Duggar referred to the procedure as a "baby holocaust." Additionally, the Duggars likened abortion to genocide in a blog post, where they calculated that "more than 56 million lives have been destroyed in our country!" and referred to abortion as "an American Holocaust."

(h/t Raw Story)

 


By Jenny Kutner

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