For almost a decade, Michelle Duggar was the poster child for unfit mothers in this country. This was a woman who dragged her feet reporting eldest son Josh for molesting several girls–including his own sisters. Earlier, she condoned the existence of a manifestly unsafe, unsanitary, and unlawful living situation where as many as 18 people were crammed inside a house designed for only six before they moved to their current mansion. This resulted in boys and girls sleeping in the same room–and sometimes in the same beds. It also made for a smorgasbord of logistical problems, like having enough hot water to take showers and do laundry. To give you an idea how bad things got, Jinger once recalled that she and her siblings had to hide food in the bathroom because they weren’t sure if they would have enough to eat.
Well, we now have a new patron saint for unfit mothers in this country–Donna Arthur, the so-called mother of Ohio Democratic gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton. As we all know by now, Arthur was the star of quite possibly the most abhorrent ad in recent memory. Republican candidate Vivek Ramaswamy put Arthur in front of the camera to call Acton a liar. Never mind that when Arthur’s second husband, Cledith “Bud” Arthur, molested 12-year-old Amy in 1978, Arthur did just about the worst thing any mother could do. She sided with the monster who harmed her daughter, even fleeing to Pennsylvania with him after he was indicted. Acton hasn’t seen or spoken to her so-called mother since the day her stepfather was indicted. In 2019, not long after becoming Ohio’s health director, Acton told her hometown paper, The (Youngstown) Vindicator, that when she tried to kiss her mother, Arthur turned her cheek away. And yet, Ramaswamy saw fit to make her the face of an attack ad.
When I saw this ad drop, it made me shudder. After all, 20 years ago, I went through the worst time of my life due to a woman who was every bit as morally bankrupt as Donna Arthur.
As many longtime Kossacks know, my first marriage to an emotionally abusive and controlling woman effectively ended in August 2006 when my first wife’s son made good on threats to beat me up. I pressed charges, thinking that would be the end of it. Imagine my surprise on the the Saturday after Labor Day when the police showed up at my door and said the daughter of a friend of my wife’s who was crashing with us at our place had accused me of making her watch X-rated movies and threatening to beat her up if she told anyone.
There were two big problems. First, my then-wife had supposedly found out what I had done mere hours after the police had taken her son in for beating me up. That alone was enough for my lawyer, a former DA in Charlotte, to realize within five minutes that this was retaliation. Second, and more seriously, I was at work at the time my wife said this happened–and my time card proved it. On paper, this was DNA-level evidence that my first wife was lying.
I thought that would have been the end of it, the case still went forward on the day of the first appearance after the DA handling the case squawked, “We have a right to present our case!” Never mind that the time card showed that there was no case. I had to go through calling pretrial release every Monday for five months, until the case was finally dismissed when they didn’t show up for court a second time.
The thing that really angers me 20 years later is that my first wife’s friend sat there and allowed this to happen. What mother with any kind of love for her daughter would sit there and allow someone to tell her daughter to lie under oath? And even in the unlikely event she didn’t know that my first wife had made her daughter do this, she almost certainly knew when they told her I’d been arrested. All she had to do was pick up the phone, call the police and tell the truth. If that woman had done what she should have done–what she was LEGALLY REQUIRED to do–I wouldn’t have had to endure that ordeal. And had that woman done what any mother would have and should have done, my first wife would have been the one in cuffs.
This is why I’ve had to restrain myself from cussing Ramaswamy out on any of his recent social media posts. How anyone could give succor to a woman displaying the level of moral vacuity that Arthur displayed is beyond comprehension. It’s also why the Duggar saga hit me on a personal level. In my view, the only substantive difference between Michelle Duggar and Donna Arthur is money.
To be sure, what happened to me was minor league compared to what Acton endured as a girl and what Josh’s victims endured. But the effect is still the same. A monster escaped justice because a so-called mother failed to do her most basic legal and moral duty as a mother. That Ramaswamy saw fit to normalize it is why he must never be allowed to be within an area code of office at any level.
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