Remember when conservatives pounced on the opportunity to try and paint liberal darling Lena Dunham as a pedophile for weird but harmless passages in Not That Kind of Girl? That faux scandal should have been deaded in November, when child psychologists and sexual abuse experts said Dunham's behavior didn't equate to sexually abusing her younger sister. But in the wake of the Josh Duggar scandal, a clear case of actual abuse covered up by his family, Sarah Palin is trying to make this dumb conversation come back.
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The former vice-presidential and current spewer of nonsense took to Facebook to call Dunham a pedophile call out liberals for being "disgusting hypocrites." She thinks the media has given Dunham a pass for her interactions with her sister because it was "cute." In reality, Dunham wasn't crucified because her stories were deemed "within the norms of childhood sexual behavior" by the likes of psychologist Sharon Lamb.
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“Do we all have uteruses?” I asked my mother when I was seven.
“Yes,” she told me. “We’re born with them, and with all our eggs, but they start out very small. And they aren’t ready to make babies until we’re older.” I look at my sister, now a slim, tough one-year-old, and at her tiny belly. I imagined her eggs inside her, like the sack of spider eggs in Charlotte’s Webb, and her uterus, the size of a thimble.
“Does her vagina look like mine?”
“I guess so,” my mother said. “Just smaller.”
One day, as I sat in our driveway in Long Island playing with blocks and buckets, my curiosity got the best of me. Grace was sitting up, babbling and smiling, and I leaned down between her legs and carefully spread open her vagina. She didn’t resist and when I saw what was inside I shrieked.
My mother came running. “Mama, Mama! Grace has something in there!”
My mother didn’t bother asking why I had opened Grace’s vagina. This was within the spectrum of things I did. She just on her knees and looked for herself. It quickly became apparent that Grace had stuffed six or seven pebbles in there. My mother removed them patiently while Grace cackled, thrilled that her prank had been a success.
Amy Lang also defended the passage, telling Salon: "It’s totally normal for kids to be curious about each other’s private parts and the fact that she checked out her sister’s vulva — not vagina, that’s inside and hard to see — is completely typical behavior.
Josh Duggar, however, inappropriately touched four of his sisters and a babysitter when he was 14 years old. His parents admitted such in an interview last night with Fox News' Megyn Kelly. His father, Jim Bob, knew about the offenses for more than a year before contacting police in 2006. By the time police investigated the statute of limitations ran out, preventing Duggar from being prosecuted.
Normally we'd call out Palin for failing to understand nuance, but this goes beyond that. The difference between Dunham's curiosity at 7 years old and Josh Duggar's molestation beginning at age 14 couldn't be more clear.
