Looking back, it was always bound to happen.
On some level, Jim Bob Duggar must have known that when his kids began to leave the house and start families of their own, they would come to question some of the more troubling aspects of their bizarre upbringing.
And he must have anticipated that those questions would cause him to lose some of the strict control over his kids that he's exercised since the moment he became a father.
But in all likelihood, he never imagined the unraveling would take place this abruptly -- or this publicly.
As you're probably aware, for the past several months, Jim Bob has been locked in a bittter feud with Derick Dillard, the husband of his daughter Jill.
Derick claims that Jim Bob has stolen millions from his own children by pocketing their earnings from the family's TLC reality shows.
Insiders say that rather than defending himself, Jim Bob has decided to simply cut ties with Jill as punishment for her husband's disloyalty.
The situation has led Counting On fans to question Jim Bob's feelings toward his other sons-in-law.
Of particular interest is the fraught relationship between Jim Bob and Jinger Duggar's husband, Jeremy Vuolo.
Sources close to the family claim that Jinger was disowned by her parents after she and Jeremy relocated to Los Angeles.
But Jim Bob openly disliked Jeremy long before the Vuolos relocated to that ironically-named bastion of sin (this is just how we assume JB feels about the City of Angels).
The Duggar patriarch was skeptical from the start, as -- unlike Dillard and Ben Seewald -- Jeremy had not been hand-selected by Jim Bob himself.
On top of that, Vuolo is a public school-educated former professional athlete whose past is not as flawlessly pious as JB would like.
Fans noticed from the start that Jim Bob seemed not to approve of Jeremy.
He was put through a far more grueling approval process during the courtship phase, despite the fact that he had stepped away from his career as a pro soccer player in order to become a minister.
Jim Bob's disdain for Jeremy seems to stem largely from the fact a past incident in which Vuolo was arrested during a drunken night out in college.
Jeremy wrote about the incident in his "faith testimonial," describing it as a crucial turning point in his journey toward Christianity:
"I was part of the college party scene and was living foolishly. I began sliding deeper and deeper into the pits of lust and selfishness and pride," he wrote.
"At one point it got so bad that I even spent a night in a holding cell at the local police station for refusing to obey a police officer during a night downtown."
Surely, Jim Bob can't be so disgusted by an incident that occurred in Vuolo's teens that he considers the 32-year-old sullied for life, can he?
Well, it's impossible to overstate the extent of Jim Bob's sanctimoniousness, so there's a very good chance that's the case.
But insiders say there are other -- equally arbitrary -- reasons that Jim Bob so profoundly distrusts Jinger's daughter.
For one, Jeremy is not southern by birth.
Jim Bob reportedly feared that Vuolo would take Jinger away from Arkansas, and -- to be fair -- that's exactly what happened.
This is a problem in Jim Bob's eyes, as he reportedly always regarded Jinger as the most willful of his children and, thus, the one most in need of close observation.
Sources have claimed that when Jinger began wearing shorts with Jeremy's approval, Jim Bob took it as a confirmation that all of his worst fears were coming true.
That sentence would seem thoroughly ridiculous if applied to any other family -- but this is the Duggars we're talking about, which makes it seem entirely plausible.
