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.
They are well aware that their "living God", this deity that they have a "personal relationship" with, that omnipresent and omnipotent being... doesn't do anything worthwhile. No, sorry... doesn't do ANYTHING, period.
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.
Around 2005, I had already left the faith. My favourite bookstore had regular used books in the front, and a very large adult video and magazine section in the back. So one day, I headed to the, um, back section, and, Lo and Behold, who should I see perusing the pornastry? A Bible College prof from my old Bible College! I saw, but he did not see me, but who cares? I was no longer a Christian anyway. This guy always gave a creepy vibe when he was teaching class. He constantly leered at all the young girls, literally licking his lips.
Sounds like his kind's dream job. All that's needed from him is to spew bullshit on the daily, and in return he gets access to young, impressionable, naive girls.
Maybe he had one in the past but I'm guessing the whole reason he agreed to this arrangement with his son is because he's never looked at porn on his computer. This is his way of getting intrusive monitoring under the pretend guise of fair treatment.
My guess is he has a burner smart phone and an 'unofficial' computer which Junior doesn't know about. This guy has something super creepy in his background. We just don't know what it is - yet.
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).
Just as an aside, my experience with AA was to threaten and punish. Every group I attended, I had one or more people state that if they caught me drinking, they would kick my ass.
"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.
Isn't there supposed to be a companion process where a parent discovers the child has zir OWN body, zir OWN mind, and zir OWN desires, preferences, opinions, and viewpoints?
There certainly ought to be, but I've often seen the uncomfortable results of that process being incomplete. From the parents' perspective, their kids growing up is a series of losses that the parents must endure, and so they sometimes resist each step of the children's differentiation.
Their relationships go through role changes: Married couples (hopefully) relate to each other as adult-to-adult. When they have kids, they don't relate to their kids as adult-to-child, but as a new role, PARENT-to-child. The kids do their differentiation thing, and after much struggle become adults themselves. That's when the parents have to learn to stop relating to them as parents-to-children or even parents-to-adults, but go all the way to relating to their grown up sons and daughters as adults-to-adults. It can be very difficult for those parents to retire that parent role and just enjoy being adults again.
I had that discussion with my nephew last year. He was going through a lot of differences of opinion with his father, my brother-in-law. I told him that he was 20 years old, and needed to learn to talk to his father man to man, not boy to man, not son to father
"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."
It's also a way of saying I can't trust ME. You can't trust me, either, to be who I say I am, to do what I have taught you to do. Or for me to claim that what I claim to do is what I actually do. You can't trust my guidance. I can't trust my guidance, either.
Weird Religion they have there. No morality without jesus. No morality WITH Jesus. Always ready to fall off the precipice of sin into the abyss. And it's ALWAYS sexual sins.
There is also the whole problem of 'forbidden fruit' - It didn't keep Eve from taking a bite of the apple - nor Adam. And, it has been pointed out many times that the surest way to get a kid to read a book it to tell them it is banned. The son grew up in the computer age. He likely had his work-around before Creepy Mike had to call Josh Dugger to find out how to do it.
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.
Lucky you have the insurance, but horrible you have to deal with it.
I got an email yesterday from our PHARMACY insurance provider. It said there was a problem with a prescription, but of course, it wouldn't tell me which prescription, except my number. How many bottles of pills do I have to look through to find out which one that is? I don't bother to look, I just called them. I spoke to a woman, gave her the prescription number, and she said that there was no problem with it.
I told her that I hate having to deal with her company precisely because of this kind of wasteful garbage. They send me an email to tell me there's something wrong, there isn't anything wrong, and I have to waste 10 minutes of my life and five minutes of time to deal with the problem that doesn't exist >
A couple of years ago, I had to get something done for my heart. The doctor says the insurance would not pay for it, but I would pay considerably reduced rate. I called the insurance and they said they would pay for it. Some 20 hours of talking back-and-forth, After having said that they would pay for it, they decided they would not pay for it. So instead of the $150 paid back to me, they paid $1000 back to the doctor.
I'm waiting for them to tell me that the formulary for next year doesn't include this particular medicine anymore. They've done it with 3 other diabetic medications 3 years running about 4-5 years ago. Worse, this med is *really* working. My A1C is down nearly a full number since last year and I've lost 25 lbs in the same time.
I've also had Walgreens tell me there is an insurance problem with one of my meds and then 3 days later (after contacting the doctor for an alternative) text me to come pick it up. I also had to change eye clinics from the doctor I had been using for 6-7 years for my cataract surgeries, because my regular doctor was in the extended network ($650 deductible and 20% coinsurance) vs the in-network ($100 co-pay per eye and office visits)
Basic organizational sociology explains it all for you. After a time, bureaucracies cease to serve the organizations they run, and serve themselves with the perpetuation of evermore bureaucratic rules and requirements to service those bureaucratic rules. That keeps the bureaucracies on the job.
I've seen this over and over again. That thing about the heart test from a few years ago just amazed me how much time and energy went into serving both the bureaucracy of Blue Shield and Stanford medicine. If they had done what they said they would do, and just give me $150, Everything would've been fine. Instead, they paid Stanford $1000 and wasted about 20 hours or more of bureaucratic time on both organizations dime.
When I was still having problems with left wrist, it spasmed and knocked a pill bottle out of my right hand. After bobbling it for a moment, it fell to the floor, knocking most of the pills out. My insurer won't refill it until later this month unless I pay full price, which I can't afford.
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.
Mike Johnson is an obscenity to our government in more ways than I care to count. He amounts to the antithesis of what the founders wanted for this country, and that doesn't just make him an 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.
While this was a few years ago and the boy is now an adult, I'm 50 and I don't want to know about my father's (or stepfather's) porn viewing habits. And I don't want them to know about mine.
That tracks with the all-too-common TV trope where dad is about to leave on a trip or something, and tells his 10-year-old son, "You're the man of the house now, so take care of your mother."
As a child, I would hear that and think "Huh? Is the boy now in charge of his mother? What happens when this 'man-of-the-house' misbehaves? Is mom not allowed to correct him?"
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.
It’s none of their business when it’s legal, harming no one, and between two consenting adults, but those are the only instances where the religious seem to give a crap. They ignore, enable, excuse, and hide when it’s them doing something illegal, harmful, and often with children who cannot consent or folks who have not given consent. Look at this weekend’s episode, a person doing nothing wrong in the slightest was shamed to death for his dressing in drag, but there’s no outcries over the thousands of priests molesting hundreds of thousands of children. Or youth pastors or preachers of other sects. In fact they cheer when the girl child gets pregnant and decides it’s the least damning solution is to marry her rapist. Or the parents force her to. There are very few of any (likely none) cases of preachers committing suicide because they were caught molesting a kid, no they’re moved from parish to parish, protected by the church hierarchy, congregations, and the police. Why would they feel shame at all, let alone enough to wish themselves dead, if the folks in their lives didn’t care that they’re criminals.
The only time these types get up in arms is when folks are doing legal, safe, sane, and consensual adult sexual activities. Just because it doesn’t fit in their tiny little book of small mindedness.
All good observations but... this appears to be more of a 'parent being authoritarian' problem than a 'church being authoritarian' problem. As far as I can tell, Johnson's church didn't force him into this very weird behavior and Johnson's church isn't demanding he report the weekly results to them. I mean maybe they are, but that's not what I get from the story. What I get from the story is Johnson pushing this weird computer assisted tattletale relationship on his kid.
I remember that program. I remember pastors preaching about what a great idea it was, and how everyone should have an accountability partner, and how it would make everything that church better if the membership did it.
So far as I'm aware, nobody actually did any such thing at the church I was attending at the time. The Prayer Chain (as in, the Church Gossip Gang) was bad enough, even when they did do a good job of pretending it was all being done for love of the church. The level of trust needed among the members of a church for something like accountability partners never seems to exist. I'm pretty sure that after a couple of incidents, the whole thing went away mostly because it tried to hold the leadership to the same levels of accountability as everyone else. I have good reasons for my personal trust issues with Christians and so far, nothing I've seen them do, heard them say, or read about them has convinced me to change my mind on that.
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.
In the story upthread that GS posted (also mentioned his email) it states that the people who told him about Covenant Eyes strongly *suggested* using your teenage son as an accountability partner.
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.
It does trivialize life to ban contraception, it creates a caste system based on sex and gender. It dehumanizes half the population. How many gender reveals gone wrong do we see where one or both parents are visibly disappointed in the outcome of a girl? How many for boys? We had a huge country limit the number of children born and what happened? They preferred boys to such an extent that they caused a new problem with reproduction and ended up kidnapping girls from other countries to make up for it.
Nothing in the pursuit to end abortion or contraception or the idea of go forth and multiply ever takes the women into consideration. They defend high maternal mortality rates as the greatest achievement for women is to die for their babies. Our purpose in life is expressed to us from day one is please men and make babies. Anyone resisting that is declared selfish, slutty, difficult, or historically burned at the stake as a witch.
It sets up men as people, life worth protecting and women as incubators who can make sandwiches.
Ok, maybe I was slightly overstating the case but in his new position he has great influence over which bills get passed and which get tabled. And in general, I was using Johnson as a stand-in for the Republicans that have been passing laws (mostly State but some Fed) that force me to live by their religious rules.
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.
They are well aware that their "living God", this deity that they have a "personal relationship" with, that omnipresent and omnipotent being... doesn't do anything worthwhile. No, sorry... doesn't do ANYTHING, period.
"Well, son, god might respect your free will - but I sure don't have to!"
Mike's Johnson has a mind of its own ('think with your big head, not the little one.')
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.
1984 Redux: Big Brother meets Ted Cruz.
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.
Or a PS2 who read DVDs and doesn't need a WiFi connection to work.
Around 2005, I had already left the faith. My favourite bookstore had regular used books in the front, and a very large adult video and magazine section in the back. So one day, I headed to the, um, back section, and, Lo and Behold, who should I see perusing the pornastry? A Bible College prof from my old Bible College! I saw, but he did not see me, but who cares? I was no longer a Christian anyway. This guy always gave a creepy vibe when he was teaching class. He constantly leered at all the young girls, literally licking his lips.
Sounds like his kind's dream job. All that's needed from him is to spew bullshit on the daily, and in return he gets access to young, impressionable, naive girls.
Maybe he had one in the past but I'm guessing the whole reason he agreed to this arrangement with his son is because he's never looked at porn on his computer. This is his way of getting intrusive monitoring under the pretend guise of fair treatment.
My guess is he has a burner smart phone and an 'unofficial' computer which Junior doesn't know about. This guy has something super creepy in his background. We just don't know what it is - yet.
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.
'Puritanism: "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, might be happy."' - H.L. Mencken.
Shall we mention that those "Purity Rings" and the pledges associated with them have, to my understanding, been an unmitigated failure?
I think I just did.
Yeah, it's like the Abstinence Only "sex ed" they pushed back during the Bush years. All it did was make the STD rate in teenagers skyrocket...
When the repression of their great-grandparents age didn't stop teenagers having sex, why do they think there is anything they can do that will?
The very definition of insanity!
You can't fight Mother Nature when the hormones are kicking in!
Yeah, remember the Palins?
"Abstinence Only sex ed works! Pay no attention to my multiple-times pregnant unmarried daughter!"
When I read this, I am glad to be born in the 80's even if you will have to pry my smartphone from my cold hands.
I think you have it exactly. This is simply another way to handle authoritarianism and make it look like it's not.
Just FYI:
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/jonas-brothers-purity-rings-b2339533.html
LOL!!
"Joe agreed with his younger brother, as he added: “When you’re 12 versus when you’re like 16 is a very big difference.”
Puberty is a bitch!
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).
Just as an aside, my experience with AA was to threaten and punish. Every group I attended, I had one or more people state that if they caught me drinking, they would kick my ass.
Yikes! Well that's unpleasant and disappointing. They really ARE a religious organization. ;)
Totally religious
"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.
Isn't there supposed to be a companion process where a parent discovers the child has zir OWN body, zir OWN mind, and zir OWN desires, preferences, opinions, and viewpoints?
There certainly ought to be, but I've often seen the uncomfortable results of that process being incomplete. From the parents' perspective, their kids growing up is a series of losses that the parents must endure, and so they sometimes resist each step of the children's differentiation.
Their relationships go through role changes: Married couples (hopefully) relate to each other as adult-to-adult. When they have kids, they don't relate to their kids as adult-to-child, but as a new role, PARENT-to-child. The kids do their differentiation thing, and after much struggle become adults themselves. That's when the parents have to learn to stop relating to them as parents-to-children or even parents-to-adults, but go all the way to relating to their grown up sons and daughters as adults-to-adults. It can be very difficult for those parents to retire that parent role and just enjoy being adults again.
I had that discussion with my nephew last year. He was going through a lot of differences of opinion with his father, my brother-in-law. I told him that he was 20 years old, and needed to learn to talk to his father man to man, not boy to man, not son to father
As always, bang on. BUT....
"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."
It's also a way of saying I can't trust ME. You can't trust me, either, to be who I say I am, to do what I have taught you to do. Or for me to claim that what I claim to do is what I actually do. You can't trust my guidance. I can't trust my guidance, either.
Weird Religion they have there. No morality without jesus. No morality WITH Jesus. Always ready to fall off the precipice of sin into the abyss. And it's ALWAYS sexual sins.
There is also the whole problem of 'forbidden fruit' - It didn't keep Eve from taking a bite of the apple - nor Adam. And, it has been pointed out many times that the surest way to get a kid to read a book it to tell them it is banned. The son grew up in the computer age. He likely had his work-around before Creepy Mike had to call Josh Dugger to find out how to do it.
It was all the woman's fault. It says to right in the bible.
Patriarchy always seems to win. They want to implement 'The Handmaid's Tale' just ASAP.
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.
Jesus ... and I've just gotten upset because they're going to reimpose the five dollar prescription charge.
I have government-run healthcare through the VA. No charge at all for prescriptions.
TBF, my copay with my insurance is $25. But without it, that's more than my house payment.
My couch is free.
My chair/lounge/bed is free too.
DM previous couch was destroyed by 50 pounds of dogs who loved to jump on and above it.
Lucky you have the insurance, but horrible you have to deal with it.
I got an email yesterday from our PHARMACY insurance provider. It said there was a problem with a prescription, but of course, it wouldn't tell me which prescription, except my number. How many bottles of pills do I have to look through to find out which one that is? I don't bother to look, I just called them. I spoke to a woman, gave her the prescription number, and she said that there was no problem with it.
I told her that I hate having to deal with her company precisely because of this kind of wasteful garbage. They send me an email to tell me there's something wrong, there isn't anything wrong, and I have to waste 10 minutes of my life and five minutes of time to deal with the problem that doesn't exist >
A couple of years ago, I had to get something done for my heart. The doctor says the insurance would not pay for it, but I would pay considerably reduced rate. I called the insurance and they said they would pay for it. Some 20 hours of talking back-and-forth, After having said that they would pay for it, they decided they would not pay for it. So instead of the $150 paid back to me, they paid $1000 back to the doctor.
Absolutely insane..
I'm waiting for them to tell me that the formulary for next year doesn't include this particular medicine anymore. They've done it with 3 other diabetic medications 3 years running about 4-5 years ago. Worse, this med is *really* working. My A1C is down nearly a full number since last year and I've lost 25 lbs in the same time.
I've also had Walgreens tell me there is an insurance problem with one of my meds and then 3 days later (after contacting the doctor for an alternative) text me to come pick it up. I also had to change eye clinics from the doctor I had been using for 6-7 years for my cataract surgeries, because my regular doctor was in the extended network ($650 deductible and 20% coinsurance) vs the in-network ($100 co-pay per eye and office visits)
Insurance is nuts.
Basic organizational sociology explains it all for you. After a time, bureaucracies cease to serve the organizations they run, and serve themselves with the perpetuation of evermore bureaucratic rules and requirements to service those bureaucratic rules. That keeps the bureaucracies on the job.
I've seen this over and over again. That thing about the heart test from a few years ago just amazed me how much time and energy went into serving both the bureaucracy of Blue Shield and Stanford medicine. If they had done what they said they would do, and just give me $150, Everything would've been fine. Instead, they paid Stanford $1000 and wasted about 20 hours or more of bureaucratic time on both organizations dime.
When I was still having problems with left wrist, it spasmed and knocked a pill bottle out of my right hand. After bobbling it for a moment, it fell to the floor, knocking most of the pills out. My insurer won't refill it until later this month unless I pay full price, which I can't afford.
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.
It might be delicious, if it wasn't so fucking scary.
How long before the police/GQP weaponize this kind of surveillance?
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 short answer: Yes.
The fact that this guy is House Speaker is the true obscenity.
Mike Johnson is an obscenity to our government in more ways than I care to count. He amounts to the antithesis of what the founders wanted for this country, and that doesn't just make him an obscenity.
It makes him dangerous.
His entire party is the reason the Founders did what they did.
Kevin McCarthy is looking better and better each minute. Thanks, Matt Gaetz!
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.
While this was a few years ago and the boy is now an adult, I'm 50 and I don't want to know about my father's (or stepfather's) porn viewing habits. And I don't want them to know about mine.
Exactly. Johnson and Johnson have no clue about healthy boundaries.
I did learn about my dad's habits, sort of. Or at least I found the stack of Penthouse he had stashed away.
The question is, did he hide them poorly so you *would* find them?
No, I had to work to find them.
That tracks with the all-too-common TV trope where dad is about to leave on a trip or something, and tells his 10-year-old son, "You're the man of the house now, so take care of your mother."
As a child, I would hear that and think "Huh? Is the boy now in charge of his mother? What happens when this 'man-of-the-house' misbehaves? Is mom not allowed to correct him?"
Talk about absurd.
Yes and that a 10 year old boy would have more physical prowess than a grown woman. Really?
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.
It’s none of their business when it’s legal, harming no one, and between two consenting adults, but those are the only instances where the religious seem to give a crap. They ignore, enable, excuse, and hide when it’s them doing something illegal, harmful, and often with children who cannot consent or folks who have not given consent. Look at this weekend’s episode, a person doing nothing wrong in the slightest was shamed to death for his dressing in drag, but there’s no outcries over the thousands of priests molesting hundreds of thousands of children. Or youth pastors or preachers of other sects. In fact they cheer when the girl child gets pregnant and decides it’s the least damning solution is to marry her rapist. Or the parents force her to. There are very few of any (likely none) cases of preachers committing suicide because they were caught molesting a kid, no they’re moved from parish to parish, protected by the church hierarchy, congregations, and the police. Why would they feel shame at all, let alone enough to wish themselves dead, if the folks in their lives didn’t care that they’re criminals.
The only time these types get up in arms is when folks are doing legal, safe, sane, and consensual adult sexual activities. Just because it doesn’t fit in their tiny little book of small mindedness.
They thump their bibles and point fingers, but they don't do what their Jesus commands by plucking an eye out at seeing something that offends them.
If true believers were really true believers they'd be physically blind, not just blind to all the flaws and faults of their religion.
𝐴𝑙𝑙 𝑟𝑒𝑙𝑖𝑔𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑖𝑠 𝑐𝑎𝑓𝑒𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑖𝑎 𝑟𝑒𝑙𝑖𝑔𝑖𝑜𝑛...
-- David Silverman
But for how long is it going to remain legal? Although I imagine they do have a certain amount of lobbying power?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08OU-Ip05H4
We all know what happens when you're alone in the house right?
"The call is coming from inside the house."
All good observations but... this appears to be more of a 'parent being authoritarian' problem than a 'church being authoritarian' problem. As far as I can tell, Johnson's church didn't force him into this very weird behavior and Johnson's church isn't demanding he report the weekly results to them. I mean maybe they are, but that's not what I get from the story. What I get from the story is Johnson pushing this weird computer assisted tattletale relationship on his kid.
I remember that program. I remember pastors preaching about what a great idea it was, and how everyone should have an accountability partner, and how it would make everything that church better if the membership did it.
So far as I'm aware, nobody actually did any such thing at the church I was attending at the time. The Prayer Chain (as in, the Church Gossip Gang) was bad enough, even when they did do a good job of pretending it was all being done for love of the church. The level of trust needed among the members of a church for something like accountability partners never seems to exist. I'm pretty sure that after a couple of incidents, the whole thing went away mostly because it tried to hold the leadership to the same levels of accountability as everyone else. I have good reasons for my personal trust issues with Christians and so far, nothing I've seen them do, heard them say, or read about them has convinced me to change my mind on that.
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").
Great news. Take care of yourself as well as DM.
She comes home tomorrow too but in the afternoon to let have the time to clean a little.
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.
In the story upthread that GS posted (also mentioned his email) it states that the people who told him about Covenant Eyes strongly *suggested* using your teenage son as an accountability partner.
http://i.imgur.com/4nrZE4Y.jpg
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.
It does trivialize life to ban contraception, it creates a caste system based on sex and gender. It dehumanizes half the population. How many gender reveals gone wrong do we see where one or both parents are visibly disappointed in the outcome of a girl? How many for boys? We had a huge country limit the number of children born and what happened? They preferred boys to such an extent that they caused a new problem with reproduction and ended up kidnapping girls from other countries to make up for it.
Nothing in the pursuit to end abortion or contraception or the idea of go forth and multiply ever takes the women into consideration. They defend high maternal mortality rates as the greatest achievement for women is to die for their babies. Our purpose in life is expressed to us from day one is please men and make babies. Anyone resisting that is declared selfish, slutty, difficult, or historically burned at the stake as a witch.
It sets up men as people, life worth protecting and women as incubators who can make sandwiches.
I'm a man who had daughters, and never felt cheated for a minute. That said, it was kind of special when my grandson came along years later. lol
I fail to see what the state's interests would be in banning contraception. Johnson just wants to impose his religous world view on everyone.
Resolve the unemployment problem. If wimmen keep getting pregnant and stay at home, men will take the jobs* and become proud providers again.
* Not the ones that require to change a diaper or washing an old person of course, it’s not manly.
Not many families these days can get by on one income, because we no longer believe in paying a living wage in this country.
19th century, from Zola novels* blue collar married women worked as much as they could because there wasn't a safety net.
* Naturalist writer, he depicted what he saw.
Same in Norway. Very few families are able to live on one income only.
To him women are nothing more than brood mares.
> "Mike Johnson ... does not get to make that decision for anyone else."
This is America and he is Speaker of the House, apparently he does.
No he doesn't. He may think he does, but it would take both houses of Congress and the President to do what he wants.
Ok, maybe I was slightly overstating the case but in his new position he has great influence over which bills get passed and which get tabled. And in general, I was using Johnson as a stand-in for the Republicans that have been passing laws (mostly State but some Fed) that force me to live by their religious rules.
I have no doubt but what he would like nothing better than to create a Christo-fascist theocracy.
Or 6 judges.