Letters to the Editor
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Actually Quite Funny
I saw the sight a few days ago through a link at Digbys. After visiting and having a good laugh, I was suprised to see several threads discussing whether it was real or not.
Hats off to the clever "perps".
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Laugh Riot
This is happening all over the world all the time.
It's funny here because...why, exactly?
Is it because all those real young girls being forced into real rape and marriage against their will are...not real?
Saw something on PBS last night that tracked the Afghani female politician so many poor and desperate people turned to as a judge and advocate. One was a 13-year-old girl who was threatened with forced marriage to a 70-year-old. She wound up sobbing, "If you can't help me I have nothing, only God."
Her family wound up having to flee to Iran.
She and her millions of sisters are still slaves.
A friend of mine is working on a sex-slavery case in a quiet valley only a few hours from Washington DC. Yesterday she spent an hour with a nine-year-old girl...
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A clever parody of fundamentalist Christianity
I think the site has a very specific American bend, and in that context, I don't think it's offensive by relation to real forced marriages in other countries - in fact, it probably brings attention to it. It's a clever parody of fundamentalist Christianity and out-of-date marriage laws, and I think it's pretty effective.
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MarryOurDaughter is no more a hoax than Patriarchy Theory.
But Patriarchy Theory, positing the existence of some nefarious evil cabal of men and women intended to oppress women is responsible for far more damage.
Patriarchy Theory is a culty pseudoscience that promotes an unfalsifiable, unmeasurable hypothesis, and demands bad policy based on it.
Why would any self-enlightened feminist think that marryourdaughter is real? What does that say about your levels of gullibility or paranoia?
What does it say about your belief in patriarchy theory?
To review: sexism is real and can be measured and should be eliminated. Patriarchy theory as anything different from sexism is an untestable hypothesis. It cannot be falsified.
a) Sexism can be measured.
b) How do you measure the patriarchal influence?
c) Sexism can be eliminated
d) Describe a world without patriarchy. It can't be done.
Critical thinking people. Live it. Love it.
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Don't we wish it was over ...
While that web site might think it's a joke - the problem is real enough - even in the US, where this testimony was heard this week in a Utah court:
ST. GEORGE - Jane Doe felt so "dirty and used" after having sex the first time with her husband she retreated to a bathroom, curled up on the floor and bawled.
"I felt like a horrible person," she said. "I didn't understand why he had done what he had just done."
Doe, who was then 14, had been married to her 19-year-old cousin earlier by polygamous sect leader Warren S. Jeffs. She put off her husband's sexual advances for weeks.
http://www.sltrib.com/ci_6902425
Got any ideas on how to actually turn that around ? It's been going on for quite some time there, and not only with these 'FLDS' members.
BTW, Jeffs defense is that the 'husband' didn't follow the sect's 'teachings'.
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oh man i wanna see the proposals
anyone bet they've caught some pervs already?
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hey oh man, do we need to explain what "hoax" means?
Missing required body.
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Why were my posts deleted?
Did they offend the Politburo?
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It was already criminal
Adding the money issue may have upped the profile, but it also made the prank site useless as a social commentary.
It's already a federal felony (18 U.S.C. 1591) to arrange or facilitate commercialized sex with anyone under 18. There is no "marriage exception." It doesn't matter if the victims are willing participants or even if they marry their purchasers, not even their parents/guardians can legally turn sex with a minor into commercial transaction.
The felony carries a 10 year minimum prison sentence (higher if they are very young) and asset forfeiture. The federal law was passed in 2000, but states can (and most likely have) criminalized such commercialized sexual arrangements, just like when otherwise-legal sex between consenting adults becomes criminal when it's done for a fee.
Because there is now a federal law, it applies in every state and all US territories (even Puerto Rice, the US Virgin Islands, and Guam), and generally makes the offensive "hook" in Ordover's social commentary entirely pointless.
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re: testimony in the Jeffs trial
I do feel for the poor child. But her testimony is so obviously lies. I hope it doesn't hurt the case. It reads like she's saying what she thinks she's supposed to feel, not what she feels. Like this:
Prosecutors showed several photos taken that night and the next day - several of which showed a smiling Doe and her husband. But Doe said she felt "numb" and that the photos did not reflect her feelings. Of one photo, which showed her being carried over a threshold by her husband, Doe has her hands over her face.
"I had started to cry," she said. "I was trying to laugh to cover my tears."
Um. Translated: I'm very young and easily influenced, and I was picking my cues up from the people around me. I was laughing then, as the pictures show. Only when I got out of the situation did I realize that other people considered it sick, and so now I'm picking up my cues from the new people around me, who seem to think I should have been crying.
And if she couldn't figure out why her husband would do such a thing to her (at age 14) the problem goes a little deeper than an underage marriage. A 14 year old should at least know what sex is. Even a closeted Mormon teenager should know what sex is. Had she not wondered, by that age, where babies come from? Had no one explained to her preparatory to her marriage? (Mormons aren't generally shy about this.) Had she never seen two dogs doing it?
I'm sorry, but everything she's quoted as saying strikes me as extremely suspect. Are 14 year olds legally allowed to marry in Utah? if they are, it's gonna be a trick to put this guy in jail with this testimony. This looks a lot like a voluntary marriage of an underage person, which (while it can be argued that it's still sick) is perfectly legal.