Josh Duggar’s life is a troubling reality

On Josh Duggar’s wedding day, his cousin Amy, the designated “wild child” of the Duggar clan’s now-canceled reality series, “19 Kids and Counting,” gave him advice about how to kiss a girl.

Josh Duggar was a few hours away from spending unchaperoned time with his soon-to-be-wife, Anna. He and Anna had never kissed or been together without one of the Duggar parents or TLC’s cameras present. Most people would consider such an arrangement an Orwellian nightmare. Josh seemed oddly cool with it.

Once we learned some crucial backstory about Josh’s previous “mistake,” when he was a minor, it was clear why he was OK with being watched like a hawk, though it doesn’t make it any less creepy.

Amy advised her unworldly cousin not to bite Anna’s lip when he leaned in for his first kiss upon being pronounced man and wife. Of course, Amy offered the advice on camera, because that’s where even the most intimate conversations on reality shows are conducted these days.

Later, Josh confessed on camera that he didn’t think Amy really knew what she was talking about. Fortunately, the audience was spared patriarch Jim Bob Duggar’s advice about how his oldest son should conduct himself with a maiden on their wedding night.

Knowing what we know now, our heads would’ve exploded from the weight of such outrageous pretense. We now know that Josh Duggar, now 27, confessed to his parents 12 years ago that he molested several girls, some of them siblings.

Jim Bob Duggar didn’t go to the police immediately. He sat on the info for a year until young Josh, who was meeting regularly with elders in the church for counseling, was caught unchaperoned in a girl’s room, allegedly doing forbidden stuff again.

Before Arkansas police got involved in 2006, the Duggars tried to scare Josh straight by having a state trooper they knew, who is now serving time for possession of child pornography, have a talk with the boy. It clearly didn’t work.

There was eventually a police report, but the affair was handled discreetly. Because the Duggars weren’t famous conservative activists yet, it flew under the radar. Josh was sent away for counseling and hard, manual labor outside the purview of the criminal justice system. Meanwhile, the statute of limitations on the crimes expired.

Josh Duggar got another break last week when an Arkansas judge ordered his police report expunged because it contained info about a victim who is still a minor.

Eventually, Josh was accepted back into the bosom of his family, having sought forgiveness from his victims, his parents, his siblings and those in the church privy to what he would later call an “inexcusable” mistake. He resigned from his post as a lobbyist for the Family Research Council.

By the time the first iteration of the series then called “17 Kids and Growing” rolled around in 2008, the Duggars had somehow convinced themselves they were once again the epitome of conservative American family values. Their antics before the cameras gave no hint of the scandal that would inevitably engulf them and lead to the cancellation of the series.

Like Olivia Pope in “Scandal,” the Duggars insisted in a recent Facebook post that the situation had “been handled” years ago and that the media rubbernecking was unnecessary since Josh had been forgiven by Jesus, his victims, his wife and his family.

That’s why they were able to present themselves as the family many American Christians aspired to be. By sanitizing their past and accentuating the innocuous, they were able to parlay their celebrity into political influence on the Right, as well.

Every major and minor candidate for the Republican presidential nomination has been photographed with Josh Duggar. It will be interesting to see how many of them run from him now that he’s radioactive, though former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee continues to defend and extol Mr. Duggar as someone who made a “youthful mistake.” He says the Duggars are being persecuted by the liberal media. Yawn!

It is stunning that the Duggars were brazen enough to go forward with a reality series knowing that this story was bound to come out and shame their entire brood. They should’ve encouraged Josh to get a job on an oil rig in the North Atlantic instead of accepting big money to call other people “pedophiles.”

There’s a reason Jesus denounced hypocrites more than any other sinner in his day.