Scuttlebutt Pipeline

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Sept. 14, 2007 - Like most girls her age, 15-year-old Ashlee R. is into sports, clothes and current pop music. She’s a typical Midwestern teen—except that she’s looking for a husband. “She tells us none of the boys her own age are interesting to her because they ‘are still little kids’ and she is looking for an adult to start a life with,” say her parents, who’ve enrolled her on a new Web site—MarryOurDaughter.com—where they’ve set the “price” for her hand as $37,500.

Makayla S. is also 15, a traditional girl, a homebody who “cooks like a chef and decorates like Martha Stewart.” She has a cheerful, upbeat outlook on life and spends a lot of time laughing. Her bride price? $24,995.

Before you get too upset, stop: MarryOurDaughter.com isn’t real—it’s a hoax. Nonetheless, the site—which claims to be a matching service for followers of “the Biblical tradition” of arranged marriages—has managed to fool a whole lot of people. With profiles of young girls, outrageous testimonials and solicitations for proposals (as well as a sign-up page to have your own daughter listed) MarryOurDaughter.com has received 60 million hits since it launched last week—and, believe it or not, on top of angry letters, thousands of proposals.

(source)

We’ve had mail order Russian brides for so long that if this had been real it really wouldn’t have surprised me. Truth be told, somehow I don’t find this very offensive. Yes, had it been real it would have been kind of sad that these girls were being sold off, but that is a cultural view. Only a handful of countries and societies view marriage as a bond formed between a loving couple. Many view it as something that must be done to preserve the families or a matter of conveience. So before anybody gets their panties in a twist over this pleas estop and realize that one culture’s views do not necessarily reflect another’s, and certainly there is no one “superior” or right view.