17 Kids and Counting.... An Argument for Sterilization

I was channel surfing the other day and came across a repeat of TLC’s 17 Kids and Counting in which the family takes a road trip to The Creation Museum (http://www.creationmuseum.org/) in Kentucky. While this wasn’t their final destination, it covered about half of the episode, and since I’ve actually been to the Creation Museum, I thought I’d weigh in on the episode’s presentation.

The producers and camera crew consistently do a good job on this show of making sure the audience knows the joke’s on the Duggars, and that watching their lifestyle is more voyeurism than relatable TV, but this episode marks the most obvious mockery of their belief system. I don’t feel bad for the Duggars, I’m sure raising 17 (well, now 18) kids is expensive and if I were stupid enough to pop out 18 kids, I wouldn’t mind the extra cash, but I do often wonder if they watch the episodes and realize that they are surrounded by non-believers.

Often the producers will ask leading questions (for example: do you think your parents are brainwashing you) and all the children will individually answer ‘no, of course not,’ or the crew will bring in Amy, the Duggar’s less-conservative niece to mock the family’s stringent rules. In an episode where the Duggar’s eldest son Joshua gets engaged and decides to save his first kiss for the day of his wedding, Amy cheekily admits that she certainly hasn’t followed suit. Side note: since the original airing of that episode, Joshua married Anna Keller in September (http://www.ja20.com/home.html) even though they barely knew each other when they got engaged and I’m pretty sure their hormones were rushing the wedding and not true love. But maybe that’s just me. Okay, back to the Creation Museum…

In the episode where the family visits the museum, there are interviews with the founder, footage from the guided tour, and family reactions contrasted with interviews of people on the street. During this sequence, the Duggar children argue that Creationism (the belief that the earth was created 5,000 years ago by God, dinosaurs coexisted with man, and many natural signs of aging like the Grand Canyon can be explained by the flood) is the most logical explanation for the existence of life as we know it; and the people on the street argue that Carbon dating is accurate and we aren’t about to find dinosaur bones chilling with human bones anytime soon. To me, and seemingly the producers and crew the winner of this argument is crystal clear, While it is not clear if the interviewees were taken from outside of the museum or in other cities, I’m pretty sure my friend and I were the only people visiting the Museum from a Secular perspective on the day of our visit.

While it is not entirely clear from the episode of 17 Kids and Counting, the Creation Museum is an incredibly well-funded amusement park level structure in the middle of nowhere right near the Pennsylvania and Ohio borders of Kentucky. The displays include creepy animatronic dinosaurs and humans to convey the beauty of Eden that fell when that darn Eve ate a delicious apple. If she hadn’t, we would all be hanging out in that garden naked, riding dinosaurs, and assumingly still products of incest because that was cool back then. What a shame. What I found most disturbing wasn’t the fact that people paid for the construction of the place, or that all the displays of destruction and immorality look like cities, while goodness is consistently portrayed as a pastoral or dare I say, suburban landscape; my problem with the museum rests almost solely on a 22 minute interactive video that teaches kids that science is boring, and God is totally way cooler. The 4-D experience (the seats shake and you get sprayed with water during the flood sequence) begins with a confused animatronic girl, I think her name was Wendy, sitting front of a fake fire on the stage. Screens project that she is in a campsite all alone, questioning her feelings about God. All of a sudden two angels with a sharp sense of wit and Tony The Tiger appeal to kids come out of nowhere and take us all on a journey of understanding. There is a fairly long sequence in which science teachers are depicted as black and white, old and boring, while the angels wear sunglasses and backwards caps and present “facts” about Creationism that the teachers are flummoxed by – the whole film is minute after minute of propaganda and the children in the theater with us seemed to lap up every minute of it.

My experience at the museum was troubling because it forced me to admit to myself that there is still a large population of people in this country who believe in and fund places like the Creation Museum. Sarah Palin was another nasty reminder. Being there also made me realize that although I’m pretty sure the producers at 17 Kids and Counting see the world from an evolution point of view, there are probably many people that watch the TLC show and strive to live life after the Duggar example. Scary.