I avoid watching ‘reality’ TV, and I have never watched the TLC program “19 Kids and Counting” featuring the fecund fundamentalist Christian Duggar family. In fact, when I spoke with my eldest daughter last weekend about the scandal surrounding Josh Duggar, she laughed and told me she knew I had never seen it. “You called them the Doo-gers. It’s Dug-gars.”

While I’m a deeply religious Christian, the Duggar form of Christianity is unnerving to me, and hence their family scandal didn’t particularly bother me. I heartily agreed with the sentiments of National Review writer David French in his column “Put Not Your Faith in Duggars, or any Other Christian.”

But I did watch when Fox News Channel host and attorney Megyn Kelly interviewed parents Michelle and Jim Bob Duggar for the full hour on The Kelly File on Wednesday. Media critics were eager to trash the interview. Left wing Salon sneered about the “7 Most Horrifying Exchanges” in the interview, fervently reporting that there were “so many gasp-worthy moments.” Yahoo writer Ken Tucker adopted a Mean Girl persona, writing that Kelly had gone “Barbara Walter-ish” on the Duggars when she told the couple “I’m sure you’re going through hell right now.” Tucker followed with “. . .I’m going to assume that Kelly momentarily forgot that the Duggars believe in a literal hell, or perhaps she was just referring to the room where the three sat and talked . . . that we can presume was the Duggars’ home.”

What Tucker briefly alluded to in his column, but quickly dismissed, is another serious crime: the release of Josh Duggar’s juvenile police records.

Josh Duggar was between 14 and 15 years old when he inappropriately touched two of his sisters and a family friend. Clearly he was a minor child, the girls were minors, and under the law of the Duggars’ home state of Arkansas, the records of a juvenile “shall remain confidential” and “shall not be subject to disclosure under the FOI” (Freedom of Information Act). Yet Springdale, Arkansas, police chief Kathy O’Kelley approved the release of those records to In Touch Weekly and an Arkansas newspaper. As of Tuesday, In Touch published copies of Josh Duggar’s “Chilling Molestation Confession in New Police Report.”

Criminal defense attorney Mark Eiglarsh, appearing on The Kelly File the night prior to the airing of the Duggar interview, said the law is “crystal clear” that juvenile records are not to be revealed, adding “While I’m glad we know this information, I’m equally as outraged as to how we know it. She (O’Kelley) must be fired.”

Clearly the police chief violated Arkansas law. Clearly In Touch is irresponsible in its exultant publication of a juvenile’s records. And yet — just how responsible are the Duggars in willfully publicizing their brood on national television when they were concealing some dark secrets?