It is astonishing to me that anyone on the right could continue to defend the Duggars, in light of all that has happened. It is an excellent example of how conservative Christians, and conservatives in general, so easily forgive amongst their own that they would forever condemn for someone not in the fold.

If Barack Obama had been twice divorced, cheated on his previous wives, and served divorce papers to one of his wives while she was in the hospital being treated for cancer, do you think conservatives would not point to this as proof positive that he was unfit for office? And yet they have no problem with Newt Gingrich for having done just this.

Those on the right may point to the fact that Gingrich has repented and asked for forgiveness (though he never specified for what); but again, if it were Obama, would any amount of repenting make a difference with them? Not a chance.

And so it is with the Duggar family. All kinds of defenses are being put forward, but the two main ones are that Josh was a minor at the time, and that he has since repented and asked for forgiveness.

I can fully understand how the family might want to deal with such things internally. I am not saying that this was the right thing to do (Salon addresses that issue), but that many families would probably have done the same thing. It didn’t help that Josh’s father, Jim Bob Duggar, was running for Senate from Arkansas at the time, having already served as a House representative; it only increases the likelihood that the family kept it quiet and did not have their son treated because it would have derailed their campaign.

Nor am I saying that minors should be branded for life for crimes committed at that age. Whatever can be done to diagnose and hopefully treat someone like that should be done, mindful that treatment may in some cases not be enough.

However, what the Duggars did was wrong—perhaps understandable, but still unforgivably wrong. By not at least putting their son in treatment immediately after learning that he had molested underage girls, they were putting others at risk. This fact becomes imminently clear when considering that it was likely a matter of incest, and at least one of his victims may have been as young as five years old at the time.

But here’s the reason why all the calls for their show’s cancellation are fully justified, and all the defenses of the family are not: the Duggars have put themselves forward as models of morality and authors of justice, using their public pedestal not just to forward their opinions, but to shape the laws of their state and the country at large.

In 2014, Josh’s mother—fully aware of what her son had done—recorded a robocall making a statement against an anti-discrimination law, focusing specifically on transgender use of bathrooms, claiming that it allowed sexual predators posing as transgender women to use public bathrooms, endangering the daughters of parents in their town:

I don’t believe the citizens of Fayetteville would want males with past child predator convictions that claim they are female to have a legal right to enter private areas reserved for women and girls. I doubt that Fayetteville parents would stand for a law that would endanger their daughters or allow them to be traumatized by a man joining them in their private space.

If the irony of that statement isn’t bad enough, consider what Josh’s father said in 2002, when he was running for a Senate seat, regarding his position on abortion in relation to rape and incest:

If a woman is raped, the rapist should be executed instead of the innocent unborn baby. … Rape and incest represent heinous crimes and as such should be treated as capital crimes.

Note also that he said this two months after Josh had first admitted to his offense.

Protecting their son is one thing, even if they did not initially know how grave his offenses were before they decided to send him off for treatment.

However, if your son is a child predator and you cover that up, protecting him from the exact justice that you demand be taken out on others, and then you stand up in front of your community and the nation at large and ask to be accepted as authorities on morals and justice… well, you are a feckless hypocrite who deserves none of the spotlight. While others may choose to forgive, you have no right to preach.

As for their defenders? Again, ask yourself what their reaction would be if this were a prominent liberal family. It is doubtful in the extreme that more than a handful of the people forgiving the Duggars would even remotely consider forgiving such things from a family whose politics they disagree with—no matter how clearly Christian, no matter how sorrowful and repenting—much less accept the idea that such a family be allowed to continue to speak their opinions from the pulpit of the national media.

And here’s the kicker: liberals wouldn’t be defending such a family either. They might not go after them as vociferously as they now do the Duggars, but they would not, as a rule, defend any of their own guilty of such a thing.

But for Christian conservatives, and conservatives in general… well, this is just another variation of IOKIYAR.