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TONTITOWN, ARKANSAS: The Duggar family's connection to the Institute of Basic Life Principles (IBLP), a religious group, will be revealed via a docuseries. The 57-year-old Duggar patriarch Jim Bob is revisited in the new docuseries 'Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets,' which explores the family's alleged cover-up and abuse besides their connections with the 'cult-like' organization.
The program is scheduled to commence airing on June 2. Founded in 1961 by Bill Gothard, IBLP's motive was to keep children under control, the organization instilled in them the idea that a man has the right to govern over a woman through a variety of rigid regulations and strange sets of beliefs.
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Cabbage patch dolls were Satan, fast music beats the devil
Bill propagated ideas like cabbage patch dolls were satan and that music with fast beats was the devil. Bill was likewise preoccupied with power and wanted every member to submit to him. With a belief that children should heed their parents, wives obey husbands and both follow their orders. Bill even encouraged parents to spank children. Bill's curriculum which focuses "more on slut shaming than mathematics" was distributed in the form of pamphlets among the members, the Daily Mail reported.
'Beating protocol'
Bill had a "beating protocol" an anonymous participant of the organization told SpringBoard.The individual had experienced numerous beatings from his parents throughout his youth, which were triggered by insignificant things like "not getting a chore done on time or to the required degree of perfection." He recalled, "The stipulation was that we had to hold still and submissively accept the beating, and we had to stop crying and be silent and not make a sound."
"[While it was happening, my parents] would tell us what bad, awful, evil, horrible, sinful children we were. This was a specific part of Gothard's beating protocol, found in one of his pamphlets," he said before adding "It was implied that we deserved it." “That’s what you get for your sinful disobedience” was the message. He further told the media outlet, "I experienced unspeakable physical, sexual, and emotional abuse from my mother and father, who were at one point among Gothard’s “model parents.” He added, "'Gothard is not human. Gothard does not deserve compassion. Gothard is not a man, and he does not have the slightest shred of decency or humanity within him. Bill Gothard is a monster in human form."
'I wasn’t allowed to be in love'
Besides the beating protocol, IBLP members were not allowed to be in love or even date and touch a woman before marriage but there is a rule for courtship as revealed in the Reddit post. It forced several members to repress the feeling, some saying they felt to kill the monster. "I spent most of my teen years trying to repress my very normal attraction to women," Micah told InTouch. "I referred to it in my journals as a "monster," some sort of evil thing that I had to destroy or else it would destroy me," he continued. Micah said, "I knew that I wasn’t allowed to be in love until I had my parents' permission, and I wasn’t allowed to tell a girl that I was interested in her until I had her parents' permission and was prepared to marry her."
