How do you become a “conservative folk hero”? It helps a great deal if you believe, and your fellow right-wingers believe, that liberals are picking on you, contended The Daily Beast’s Ana Marie Cox in a Saturday column.

Cox defined conservative folk heroes as celebrities or demi-celebrities “whose fame is not dependent on a celebrity-generating skill (acting, singing) but on a set of beliefs.” Her examples included the Robertsons from Duck Dynasty; Joe the Plumber; Ben Carson; and the Duggar family.

Their renown, she wrote, is sustained in part by a “network of conferences, straw polls and candidate cattle-calls,” but moreover they “find their credibility increases not via leadership but through victimhood. All criticism by mainstream voices becomes proof of worthiness—and the case of Josh Duggar exposes just how self-defeating the raising up [of] these folk heroes via victimhood can be.”

In a Tuesday post for Slate, lefty pundit Marcotte explored the religious right’s fascination with (and perhaps exploitation of) the Duggar family and how it might change in light of the Josh Duggar sexual-abuse scandal. “The Duggars' [religious] extremism elicited admiration and maybe a little envy among the ranks” of Christian conservatives, Marcotte commented, “but perhaps now Republicans will learn a lesson about the dangers of embracing religious extremists.”

Marcotte thinks the GOP’s affinity for the Duggars exemplifies the religious right’s misogynistic race to the bottom: “Just as urban liberals compete to see who can eat the most organic food and libertarian types race to see who can have the most polluting truck, Christian conservatives compete to see who can deny women's autonomy the hardest.”