Joy-Anna Duggar has long been regarded as the Duggar daughter who seems most likely to follow in her mother’s footsteps.
She married young and immediately started having children — and unlike some of her older sisters, she initially showed zero interest in rebelling against the bizarre belief system with which she was raised.
That’s why fans were so surprised this week when Joy violated one of her father’s strictest rules.
Not only that, this bold act of defiance of Jim Bob’s ridiculous worldview took place very publicly on Joy’s popular YouTube channel!
Though many have expressed concerns about Joy’s marriage to Austin Forsyth, it seems the couple is in a good place these days.
And Joy couldn’t wait to show off the surprise present she received from Austin in celebration of her 29th birthday.
“So excited. He got me Fred Astaire dance classes,” Joy informed her fans.
“If you know me, you know I dance like a chicken,” she further explained, adding:
“And I am so excited about this,” Joy elaborated.
And it seems that Joy is not the only dancing enthusiast in her family.
“Cut back to Eve dancing,” Austin joked in the video, pointing the camera at the couple’s daughter.
“Yeah we caught Eve dancing,” Joy laughed.
Then she returned to the discussion about her birthday present.
“Anyway, I am so excited for my dance classes. So it’s a couple of classes and I’ve got two,” Joy told her sizable YouTube audience.
(She has over 210,000 followers on the site, and 74,000 have already watched her birthday video.)
“And if I like it we’ll do more and if not, I’ll come to the resolution that I’m not made to be a good dancer.”
Joy receiving a birthday present from her husband might not seem like a very controversial development — and by any sane standard, it’s not.
But you can be certain that her domineering father was not thrilled by her latest video.
As we’ve discussed many times in the past, Jim Bob clings to a bizarre belief system that basically holds that anything that’s not directly related to Jesus is pure evil.
In his view, dancing — all secular music — is nothing more than a tool of the devil designed to corrupt good Christian youth.
In her recent memoir, Jill Duggar recalled her mother, Michelle Duggar, warning her children that dancing would condemn them to hell for all eternity.
That’s the kind of lecture that tends to stay with a kid!
So while Joy’s birthday video might appear unremarkable, it’s actually an impressive act of bravery!
And she’s not the first Duggar woman to assert her independence in recent weeks.
At the end of last month, both Jill and Jinger Duggar put on Halloween costumes and took their kids trick-or-treating.
Again, a perfectly harmless activity that violates the “core” teachings of the Institute in Basic Life Principles, the cult that formed the foundation of Jim Bob’s bonkers worldview.
So in addition to having fun and enjoying their lives, Joy, Jill, and Jinger may have brought their obnoxious father one step closer to a total meltdown!
We love to see it!