Just one question - why does Creepy Mike need 'Covenant Eyes'? Surely all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful, omni-present Jeebus is monitor enough... Personally, I think this is child abuse.
What is disturbing about this whole business (among MULTIPLE other things!) is that, while Mikey and his son may not have READ George Orwell's 1984, they sure in favor of its brand of totalitarian surveillance. I would suspect that they wouldn't have Qualm One about superimposing that kind of scrutiny on EVERYONE.
Ya know what, Mikey? 𝗡𝗢 𝗧𝗛𝗔𝗡𝗞𝗦! You can keep your paranoia and your prudery to yourself.
Have you ever gone into a shady thrift shop or a flea market and seen a stack of really old playboys or porn tapes for sale? Wondering who the fuck would buy that shit? Well, we now know. Covenant can't check that 1985 VHS player. Covenant can't see what is carefully hidden in the back of the closet. And covenant would commit suicide if it knew what was under Mike Johnsons bed. I am willing to bet that Mike Johnsons' porn magazine would put the library of congress to shame.
Remember the Purity Balls where the creepy dads gave their daughters fake wedding rings while the daughter promised to stay a virgin until she was married?
I thought that was creepy, but then the thought of perusing your parent's phone for porn or "inappropriate" pictures and them looking at yours (how many fathers do this with their DAUGHTERS, ugh) just sets me OFF.
And when you see the people are perfectly willing to hand their privacy over to another person so they don't "stray off the path", so to speak, the desire for authoritarian leadership in our government from the right makes more sense.
They're TERRIFIED of perfectly normal sexual feelings, which is part of the reason you find so many sexual deviants within the Christian faith.
IMO it's probably a false trade for the purpose of monitoring his son. Which is really a bad comment on his parenting. Both that you want to monitor your son and that (absent some documented clinical evidence he needs it) you think he needs monitoring. A good parent-child relationship would mean...
This is not that. The purpose of AA-style buddies is, as far as I can tell, to encourage such talking about problems. To create (or strengthen) a social support network. Not to punish or threateningly deter. There is no social support provided in this family's use of this program; it is a mere threat-generator. If Johnson had regular talks with his kid about how he's dealing with relationships and the mental stress of being a young adult looking for a partner, that would be much healthier.
Parenting by nannybot. Don't do it.
***
I agree that Covenant Eyes seems to be encouraging sexist behavior (i.e. by adding a 'cost' to men professionally interacting with women).
"Nothing bonds a father and son like knowing what porn the other might be watching…"
I know you're being sarcastic, but I need to say why this relationship is so very pathological:
This father-and-son arranged mutual guilt trip is not a bonding. It is a resentment bomb. It constantly says, "Let's not trust each other. Let's not respect each other's privacy. Let's not accept that we might not be exactly the same in every way." These are the general life viewpoints that Johnson is teaching his son.
The spur of this is guilt, and like heads and tails on a coin, guilt is almost always accompanied by resentment. If you feel guilty about something, you also feel resentment. It might be mild or suppressed, but it's very likely there.
So this 17-year-old boy, (who you can bet good money has already found more than one work-around of his dad's surveillance) is probably building up an enormous reservoir of resentment because he and his dad practice a relationship of mistrust and guilt every day, all day.
The resentment bomb will eventually explode.
I realize that this information was from 2022, and so the boy is now around 18-19. LEGALLY he has the rights of an adult, but I would not expect that he has been able to develop his own fully independent sense of self and healthy emotional sovereignty. Growing up requires a process called differentiation. That is where the child and adolescent gradually discovers that he has his OWN body, his OWN mind, and his OWN desires, preferences, opinions, and viewpoints that are separate and different from his parents' bodies, minds, desires, preferences, opinions, and viewpoints.
I can only hope that he's able to eventually accomplish this, but I wouldn't be surprised if he's having difficulty.
OT: Our healthcare system is *INSANE*. I go to see my endocrinologist tomorrow and one of the meds he has me on, due to availability issues, I get at the clinic pharmacy, so I was debating calling to see if it was too early to pick up a refill (weekly, one left). Then I thought my doctor might want to put me on a higher dosage so I should wait. I went to GoodRx.com to check if there was a higher dosage (there isn't) and saw the *discounted* price: $1064 for 4 weeks. That's *one* out of 13 medications I take. I literally could not live without health insurance.
So the party that whines about the left turning the U.S. into a "nanny state" are the ones bragging about needing nanny software to protect them from following through on what they view as thought crimes. What delicious irony.
As soon as I read his keeper is his 17 y/o son, I was creeped out. Why not his wife? Perhaps because he considers his male offspring an "equal" and not his wife? That would be consistent with the "women as property" vibe of the bible he says is actually history with laws handed down by god and not fable.
Back in the late 1980's, into the 1990's, something called, The Shepherding Movement' swept through many if not most Evangelical churches, including the Pentecostal church I attended. The idea was to have a so called mentoring partner, who would also be your 'Accountability Partner.' You were to report any struggles you were having with anything like porn, lust, and the usual suspect behaviours. The problem was, the accountability was one way. He could ask me, but I could not ask the partner because he was accountable to someone else. It was the most insidious form of control church leaders exercised over members. I later found out that the Associate Pastor, (he told me himself), that when his wife and kids went away for a weekend, no sooner had the car pulled out the driveway, he headed to the local video store to rent a bunch of XXX rated movies.
If this Covenant Eyes Program had been around back then, I am sure every church leader would have had to have it on their systems, and it probably would have been a condition of church membership. I am glad you brought up the Duggar case, as this illustrates exactly how easy these programs are to defeat. I am sure many pastors and church leaders have that work around already installed.
I have stated this many many times here - it is none of the Church or States damn business what citizens get up to in the privacy of their bedrooms., so long as it is not illegal, harming anyone, and IS between consenting adults. The only people that are willing to open their bedroom door wide open are these Dumb-ass Evangelicals that want to impose some type of Christian Sharia law on the rest of us.
And this is the software that Dumb Idiot Ken Ham endorses on his own AiG website to prevent users from looking at harmless materials that exposes his toxic young earth ideologies as exactly what they're are - pure 100% toxic fantasy.
"Johnson’s accountability partner should be his wife,"
Great joke Hemant.
To quote a French movie "C'est des malades !". It would be akin to me putting a tracker app on DM's phone because she often slept at friends' places or the reverse.
I despise the use of the words "same sex attractions". That is Qhristianese of the worst sort, regardless of almost any context it is used in.
His accountability partner is his SON? WTF? Way, way, way TMI for any young man.
Whatever happened to PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY? "oh, no, I have no free will. Satan is always tempting me. Everything is always tempting me. I need a nanny. Gimmee a nannnnneeeeeee." Normal adults do not require a nanny. I do not need a nanny to tell me not to kill people, rob banks, molest kids, lie, revile, slander, grift or attempt to overthrow the government. That this Johnson does simply invites me to question his morality, the basis for it, and his god.
But then, as hemant notes: "Both men said they avoided being alone with a woman who wasn’t their wife because the optics were bad, because it could lead to infidelity, and because they wanted to avoid false allegations." it's funny, but people who don't worry constantly about sinning don't worry constantly about appearing to sin. I've never been worried about someone thinking I was molesting my nephews, because I'm not the sort of person to molest kids. Likewise, I don't worry about people thinking I'm in a bank to Rob it. I am not a walking mass of sin and temptation. You have to be a Qhristian to be that.
As I have commented many times before, the whole thing goes back to Genesis: the woman made for me gave me of the fruit of the tree, and I did eat." When you don't teach children to be responsible for themselves, they don't grow up to be responsible adults. When you teach them that someone else will bear the responsibility for their actions – the whole point of Christianity – raise children to believe in magical solutions to imaginary problems.
Captain Cassidy has lately been writing columns about the evangelical love of authoritarianism, and evangelical belief embraces and promotes authoritarianism. Teaching children to spy on adults, and encouraging adults adults to spy on children, reminds me a great deal of East Germany in the glory days of STASI.
Mike Johnson is one of the most disturbing public figures I've seen in a long time. He's even worse than Donald Trump in that he appears to be a true believer, while Trump just exploited people. It's become public in the last few days that Johnson wants to ban most forms of contraception. I simply cannot grasp what problem he would be trying to solve by doing that. It's just a matter of him imposing his religion on others. Banning contraception does not elevate the status of live, it trivializes it. If he doesn't want to practice contraception, that's between him and his wife, but he does not get to make that decision for anyone else.
Just one question - why does Creepy Mike need 'Covenant Eyes'? Surely all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful, omni-present Jeebus is monitor enough... Personally, I think this is child abuse.
What is disturbing about this whole business (among MULTIPLE other things!) is that, while Mikey and his son may not have READ George Orwell's 1984, they sure in favor of its brand of totalitarian surveillance. I would suspect that they wouldn't have Qualm One about superimposing that kind of scrutiny on EVERYONE.
Ya know what, Mikey? 𝗡𝗢 𝗧𝗛𝗔𝗡𝗞𝗦! You can keep your paranoia and your prudery to yourself.
Have you ever gone into a shady thrift shop or a flea market and seen a stack of really old playboys or porn tapes for sale? Wondering who the fuck would buy that shit? Well, we now know. Covenant can't check that 1985 VHS player. Covenant can't see what is carefully hidden in the back of the closet. And covenant would commit suicide if it knew what was under Mike Johnsons bed. I am willing to bet that Mike Johnsons' porn magazine would put the library of congress to shame.
Remember the Purity Balls where the creepy dads gave their daughters fake wedding rings while the daughter promised to stay a virgin until she was married?
I thought that was creepy, but then the thought of perusing your parent's phone for porn or "inappropriate" pictures and them looking at yours (how many fathers do this with their DAUGHTERS, ugh) just sets me OFF.
And when you see the people are perfectly willing to hand their privacy over to another person so they don't "stray off the path", so to speak, the desire for authoritarian leadership in our government from the right makes more sense.
They're TERRIFIED of perfectly normal sexual feelings, which is part of the reason you find so many sexual deviants within the Christian faith.
𝐼𝑡’𝑠 𝑛𝑜𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑤𝑒𝑖𝑟𝑑 𝑖𝑓 𝐽𝑜ℎ𝑛𝑠𝑜𝑛 𝑖𝑠 𝑢𝑠𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝐶𝑜𝑣𝑒𝑛𝑎𝑛𝑡 𝐸𝑦𝑒𝑠 𝑡𝑜 𝑚𝑜𝑛𝑖𝑡𝑜𝑟 ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝑠𝑜𝑛’𝑠 𝑖𝑛𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑛𝑒𝑡 𝑢𝑠𝑒. 𝐵𝑢𝑡 𝑖𝑡’𝑠 𝑒𝑥𝑡𝑟𝑒𝑚𝑒𝑙𝑦 𝑠𝑡𝑟𝑎𝑛𝑔𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝐽𝑜ℎ𝑛𝑠𝑜𝑛’𝑠 𝑠𝑜𝑛 𝑤𝑎𝑠 𝑚𝑜𝑛𝑖𝑡𝑜𝑟𝑖𝑛𝑔 ℎ𝑖𝑚.
IMO it's probably a false trade for the purpose of monitoring his son. Which is really a bad comment on his parenting. Both that you want to monitor your son and that (absent some documented clinical evidence he needs it) you think he needs monitoring. A good parent-child relationship would mean...
𝑇ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝑎𝑝𝑝 𝑐𝑎𝑛 𝑤𝑜𝑟𝑘 𝑖𝑛 𝑡ℎ𝑜𝑠𝑒 𝑠𝑖𝑡𝑢𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑠 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑖𝑡’𝑠 𝑛𝑜𝑡 𝑎 𝑢𝑛𝑖𝑞𝑢𝑒 𝑝𝑟𝑒𝑚𝑖𝑠𝑒 𝑎𝑡 𝑎𝑙𝑙, 𝑛𝑜 𝑑𝑖𝑓𝑓𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑛𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑛 𝑤ℎ𝑒𝑛 𝑠𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑜𝑛𝑒 𝑠𝑡𝑟𝑢𝑔𝑔𝑙𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝑎𝑙𝑐𝑜ℎ𝑜𝑙 𝑎𝑑𝑑𝑖𝑐𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑐𝑎𝑙𝑙𝑠 𝑢𝑝 𝑎 𝑝𝑎𝑟𝑡𝑛𝑒𝑟 𝑤ℎ𝑒𝑛 ℎ𝑒 𝑓𝑒𝑒𝑙𝑠 𝑎𝑛 𝑢𝑟𝑔𝑒 𝑡𝑜 𝑑𝑟𝑖𝑛𝑘.
...you can TALK to your kid about porn.
This is not that. The purpose of AA-style buddies is, as far as I can tell, to encourage such talking about problems. To create (or strengthen) a social support network. Not to punish or threateningly deter. There is no social support provided in this family's use of this program; it is a mere threat-generator. If Johnson had regular talks with his kid about how he's dealing with relationships and the mental stress of being a young adult looking for a partner, that would be much healthier.
Parenting by nannybot. Don't do it.
***
I agree that Covenant Eyes seems to be encouraging sexist behavior (i.e. by adding a 'cost' to men professionally interacting with women).
"Nothing bonds a father and son like knowing what porn the other might be watching…"
I know you're being sarcastic, but I need to say why this relationship is so very pathological:
This father-and-son arranged mutual guilt trip is not a bonding. It is a resentment bomb. It constantly says, "Let's not trust each other. Let's not respect each other's privacy. Let's not accept that we might not be exactly the same in every way." These are the general life viewpoints that Johnson is teaching his son.
The spur of this is guilt, and like heads and tails on a coin, guilt is almost always accompanied by resentment. If you feel guilty about something, you also feel resentment. It might be mild or suppressed, but it's very likely there.
So this 17-year-old boy, (who you can bet good money has already found more than one work-around of his dad's surveillance) is probably building up an enormous reservoir of resentment because he and his dad practice a relationship of mistrust and guilt every day, all day.
The resentment bomb will eventually explode.
I realize that this information was from 2022, and so the boy is now around 18-19. LEGALLY he has the rights of an adult, but I would not expect that he has been able to develop his own fully independent sense of self and healthy emotional sovereignty. Growing up requires a process called differentiation. That is where the child and adolescent gradually discovers that he has his OWN body, his OWN mind, and his OWN desires, preferences, opinions, and viewpoints that are separate and different from his parents' bodies, minds, desires, preferences, opinions, and viewpoints.
I can only hope that he's able to eventually accomplish this, but I wouldn't be surprised if he's having difficulty.
OT: Our healthcare system is *INSANE*. I go to see my endocrinologist tomorrow and one of the meds he has me on, due to availability issues, I get at the clinic pharmacy, so I was debating calling to see if it was too early to pick up a refill (weekly, one left). Then I thought my doctor might want to put me on a higher dosage so I should wait. I went to GoodRx.com to check if there was a higher dosage (there isn't) and saw the *discounted* price: $1064 for 4 weeks. That's *one* out of 13 medications I take. I literally could not live without health insurance.
rant about the obvious over, for now.
So the party that whines about the left turning the U.S. into a "nanny state" are the ones bragging about needing nanny software to protect them from following through on what they view as thought crimes. What delicious irony.
If Johnson achieves his theocratic dystopia here in what was the US, can we assume Covenant Eyes will be installed on everyone's device?
The fact that this guy is House Speaker is the true obscenity.
As soon as I read his keeper is his 17 y/o son, I was creeped out. Why not his wife? Perhaps because he considers his male offspring an "equal" and not his wife? That would be consistent with the "women as property" vibe of the bible he says is actually history with laws handed down by god and not fable.
Back in the late 1980's, into the 1990's, something called, The Shepherding Movement' swept through many if not most Evangelical churches, including the Pentecostal church I attended. The idea was to have a so called mentoring partner, who would also be your 'Accountability Partner.' You were to report any struggles you were having with anything like porn, lust, and the usual suspect behaviours. The problem was, the accountability was one way. He could ask me, but I could not ask the partner because he was accountable to someone else. It was the most insidious form of control church leaders exercised over members. I later found out that the Associate Pastor, (he told me himself), that when his wife and kids went away for a weekend, no sooner had the car pulled out the driveway, he headed to the local video store to rent a bunch of XXX rated movies.
If this Covenant Eyes Program had been around back then, I am sure every church leader would have had to have it on their systems, and it probably would have been a condition of church membership. I am glad you brought up the Duggar case, as this illustrates exactly how easy these programs are to defeat. I am sure many pastors and church leaders have that work around already installed.
I have stated this many many times here - it is none of the Church or States damn business what citizens get up to in the privacy of their bedrooms., so long as it is not illegal, harming anyone, and IS between consenting adults. The only people that are willing to open their bedroom door wide open are these Dumb-ass Evangelicals that want to impose some type of Christian Sharia law on the rest of us.
And this is the software that Dumb Idiot Ken Ham endorses on his own AiG website to prevent users from looking at harmless materials that exposes his toxic young earth ideologies as exactly what they're are - pure 100% toxic fantasy.
"Johnson’s accountability partner should be his wife,"
Great joke Hemant.
To quote a French movie "C'est des malades !". It would be akin to me putting a tracker app on DM's phone because she often slept at friends' places or the reverse.
PS : https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WUOtCLOXgm8&pp=ygUUSSB3YW50IHRvIGJyZWFrIGZyZWU%3D
Tomorrow morning (hospital "morning").
I despise the use of the words "same sex attractions". That is Qhristianese of the worst sort, regardless of almost any context it is used in.
His accountability partner is his SON? WTF? Way, way, way TMI for any young man.
Whatever happened to PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY? "oh, no, I have no free will. Satan is always tempting me. Everything is always tempting me. I need a nanny. Gimmee a nannnnneeeeeee." Normal adults do not require a nanny. I do not need a nanny to tell me not to kill people, rob banks, molest kids, lie, revile, slander, grift or attempt to overthrow the government. That this Johnson does simply invites me to question his morality, the basis for it, and his god.
But then, as hemant notes: "Both men said they avoided being alone with a woman who wasn’t their wife because the optics were bad, because it could lead to infidelity, and because they wanted to avoid false allegations." it's funny, but people who don't worry constantly about sinning don't worry constantly about appearing to sin. I've never been worried about someone thinking I was molesting my nephews, because I'm not the sort of person to molest kids. Likewise, I don't worry about people thinking I'm in a bank to Rob it. I am not a walking mass of sin and temptation. You have to be a Qhristian to be that.
As I have commented many times before, the whole thing goes back to Genesis: the woman made for me gave me of the fruit of the tree, and I did eat." When you don't teach children to be responsible for themselves, they don't grow up to be responsible adults. When you teach them that someone else will bear the responsibility for their actions – the whole point of Christianity – raise children to believe in magical solutions to imaginary problems.
Captain Cassidy has lately been writing columns about the evangelical love of authoritarianism, and evangelical belief embraces and promotes authoritarianism. Teaching children to spy on adults, and encouraging adults adults to spy on children, reminds me a great deal of East Germany in the glory days of STASI.
Mike Johnson is one of the most disturbing public figures I've seen in a long time. He's even worse than Donald Trump in that he appears to be a true believer, while Trump just exploited people. It's become public in the last few days that Johnson wants to ban most forms of contraception. I simply cannot grasp what problem he would be trying to solve by doing that. It's just a matter of him imposing his religion on others. Banning contraception does not elevate the status of live, it trivializes it. If he doesn't want to practice contraception, that's between him and his wife, but he does not get to make that decision for anyone else.