Pro-abortion advocates are trying to get the hit TLC reality show 19 Kids and Counting canceled over a pro-life remark the family’s patriarch, Jim Bob Duggar, made at a political event.
The television show, which airs weekly with an average audience of about 1.5 million, follows the lives of Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar and their 19 children. The Duggars are strong Christians and regularly speak at events nationwide.
At a Values Voter Summit last month, Jim Bob Duggar compared abortion to the Holocaust, enraging abortion supporters so much that they’re urging cancellation of his family’s show.
“Back a few years ago,” Duggar said, “I heard Gov. Huckabee speak, and he was sharing about how he had taken his daughter Sarah over to one of the concentration camps where a lot of Jewish people were killed. And he said, as they were walking out of that concentration camp … [Sarah] looked up at him and she said, ‘Daddy, why didn’t somebody do something?'”
“And, you know what?” Duggar continued. “That’s where we’re at in our nation. Do we want our children, when we’re going to tell them about how great America was, … [to] look at you and say, ‘Why didn’t somebody do something?'”
He added, “Let me clarify. We have, since 1973 [when Roe v. Wade was decided], had 55 million abortions, so what we have going on is a baby holocaust.”
Tamar Fox launched a petition to cancel 19 Kids and Counting on MoveOn.org. Fox is a self-described “superfan” of the show but says “[the Duggars’] right wing views have gone too far.”
“I take this seriously,” Fox writes, “because my grandfather was very nearly a victim of the Holocaust. He fled Austria after the Nazis had come to power, making his way to the United States, a land of freedom. He was also a lifelong progressive, who supported a woman’s right to make her own healthcare decisions.”
The petition concludes, “Let’s be clear: America today is nothing like Nazi Germany, and a woman who decides to have an abortion is not taking part in a Holocaust. Please join me in telling TLC and Discovery Media to cancel the Duggars’ show, 19 Kids and Counting, and stop rewarding people who misuse the history of the Holocaust to play politics with women’s rights.”
Fox’s petition has received just over 200 signatures to date. But another petition, created by Jodi Jacobson on credomobilize.com, has gained nearly 9,000 signatures.
“Since close to one-third of all women in the United States has or will have an abortion in her lifetime, the Duggars must believe they’re absolutely surrounded by modern-day Nazis,” Jacobson’s petition says.
It continues, “There is no way in which it’s acceptable to suggest that a mom deciding not to add to a family that may be struggling is committing a crime of genocide. There is no way in which the medical professionals who help her are like soldiers ripping families from their homes and sending them to camps where slave-labor, starvation and gas chambers were the norm.”
“This sort of hate speech is a grotesque insult to the millions of women who’ve chosen to end a pregnancy, to their health care providers, and to the families and memory of the victims of the Holocaust,” Jacobsen writes. “If TLC doesn’t agree with the Duggars that the modern United States is like concentration camp-era Nazi Germany, they should cancel 19 Kids and Counting.”
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