Friday June 12, 2009, 10:45 pm
End Financing of Mail Order Brides

To continue the success demonstrated by the elimination of Diners Club from the Bride Trafficking Industry, effort must now be directed toward the next obvious targets: major credit card companies.

The facilitating of payments used in the recruitment and sale of mail-order brides is unregulated. All the major credit card companies are involved and have been for years. The international on-line matchmaking business appears to be thriving largely because of increased Internet use worldwide, low overhead and start-up costs, and the seemingly endless supply of eligible foreign women.

Today, any man with Internet access, an electronic photo (even ten years old) and a credit card can shop. Do these card companies really need this business badly enough? Diners Club proved that the answer is no. Other card companies must now be directed to the same conclusion. The following is a very small sample of Bride Trafficking sites that have teamed up with MasterCard, Visa, AmEx, and PayPal.

While legitimizing the purchase of a human being by way of business relationships with respectable US-based corporations is ethically and philosophically disgusting, it also reduces the logistical barrier to buying a bride. Removing that barrier allows trafficker husbands to more easily acquire women. It opens the door to an ever increasing class of criminals to buy and exploit these women.

Please sign the petition.

Friday June 12, 2009, 11:20 pm
Noted and signed. For some reason, I had never really thought about this before. But, now that you have brought it to my attention, I can only imagine the horror some of these women must have gone through. With so many sickos in this world.... frightening, very frightening. (Even paypal! Now that shocked me too!) Think I'm going to learn some more about this.
Thanks Tom.

Saturday June 13, 2009, 3:45 am
Pledged,signed, and noted Thanks Tom !

Saturday June 13, 2009, 8:14 am
When I seen this I just had to add something... These wemon I have even heard of extreamely young girls being involed in this. It just breaks my heart what this country has stoop to, When men can MEN CAN BUY A GIRL OR WOMEN WITH A CREDIT CARD & THE INTERNET. I ask of the credit card companies to please take a moment to think is a human less important for the sale of a human being ? You could maybe save some lives in the process of letting these sales go.
With much respect
Sincerely,
Faith Blacksten

Saturday June 13, 2009, 8:17 am
Signed,#33 and noted with thanks Tom.

Thank you for signing the petition "Tell MasterCard, Visa, JCB, AmEx, PayPal To Stop Facilitating The Mail Order Bride Business"

Saturday June 13, 2009, 8:43 am
SIGNED

Saturday June 13, 2009, 9:03 am
I think Faith Marie asked if the life of a human being was more important then the profit. Well take a look around these days and that answer is easily seen in every dark corner of society...profit first. signed

Saturday June 13, 2009, 9:09 am
signed

Saturday June 13, 2009, 9:35 am
My wife is a "mail order bride" and both she and I couldn't be happier. We've been together for 6 years now living happily in New York City. This is NOT as black and white as you are making it out to be.
This is our story in the current Galmous Mag and every word of it is true
http://www.glamour.com/sex-love-life/2009/06/yes-this-woman-is-a-mail-order-bride

Saturday June 13, 2009, 9:54 am
Hello to Steve L - I read the story, thank-you so much for sharing that, but there are still women being expLoited for other reasons and this is what the petition is trying to deal with. I agree with you, there is some good in this way of meeting a spouse, I know people who have been married for 8 years via this route, and they are a fine couple !! It's not always so good, and a little protection goes a long way. :-)

Saturday June 13, 2009, 10:03 am
Signed Thanks Tom
Thank you for this important petition!

Saturday June 13, 2009, 10:28 am
Hello to you also Rosie ... since the Glamour article, Lera has gotten a tremendous amount of email from women who have thanked her for "coming out" because the "mail order bride" tag has been so stigmatized that many are terribly ashamed of having met their spouse in this fashion. Certainly I will never deny that many of these marriages end up horribly wrong, but would anyone deny that that can't happen no matter how two people meet. So we are trying to stop credit card companies from allowing their cards to be used to help finance mail order brides? And if I was using a credit card, you would have wanted Lera and I NOT to meet? NOT to be happy?
This is so misguided and many will be hurt in the opposite direction if you succeed ... sorry its just my opinion given my own personal experience.
WhenLera returns home I'll show her all of this and perhaps she can add her own insight.

Saturday June 13, 2009, 10:42 am
Thank you for signing the petition "Tell MasterCard, Visa, JCB, AmEx, PayPal To Stop Facilitating The Mail Order Bride Business, thanks Tom

Saturday June 13, 2009, 11:38 am
Who is Layli Miller Muro? Also, if this works, what criteria will the credit card companies use (or whatever group develops the criteria) to isolate "mail order bride" sites from all the other dating sites that may or may not have foreign women clients? Does Change.org have a blog up for this topic yet? Does anyone from Mastercard or Visa want to chime in here? These firms are currently being beat up with new regulations and may not want to give up the bride trade.

Saturday June 13, 2009, 1:35 pm



Thnx Tom!

Saturday June 13, 2009, 2:13 pm
Thank you for signing the petition "Tell MasterCard, Visa, JCB, AmEx, PayPal To Stop Facilitating The Mail Order Bride Business" Thanks Kit

Sunday June 14, 2009, 6:53 am
Oh dear do you have that there too? Thanks Tom.

Sunday June 14, 2009, 1:57 pm
This nonsense witch hunt has got to stop. Sandra McQueen...please take this hoax down now. Sites like AForeignAffair.com and Blossoms are no different from Match.com and the rise of the Internet and social networking is actually hurting this so-called industry because women can just use Facebook now. There are no such thing as mail order brides except the racist term is used by some aging US feminists with nothing better to do than belittle foreign women who like American guys because they hate the idea that other cultures prefer an average 15 year age difference between those who marry.

Do a Google search for IMBRA and Mail Order Bride and Feminism. Go to www.onlinedatingrights.com and www.veteransabroad.com.

This is all a hoax and it needs to be stopped by Care2 management now.

Sandra McQueen? Cmon...you discredit Care2 with this highly partisan garbage.

And Russian women? They are proud and happy to stay in Russia. Less than 1% go on such dating sites and none of them needs to leave that thriving country. Some are just intellectual and want to see who is out there beyond their borders. There is no such thing as a foreign woman needing to stay in the US so badly that she would stay with an abusive husband. Read more at www.mediaradar.org. Ten years ago that may have been the case and it may still be true of some African countries...but then go after the African dating sites if you may...

This vicious ideological nonsense resulted in an unconstitutional law called IMBRA that nobody is complying with. IMBRA forces US males to be background checked before they can even say hello to foreign women. Marriage "Brokers" are defined as dating sites where less than 50% of the non-paying members are American. We all know that women never pay on any worthwhile dating site (it is the nature of dating that most great looking young women refuse to pay to use a dating website).

What is extra vicious about IMBRA is that women who do not have email cannot electronically sign the affidavit that they read a man's background check results. Congress was tricked into assuming that nobody depends on snail mail letters anymore and, therefore, the postal address is not only no longer required for a man to know (to write her) but US paranoid sensibilities now say that - regardless of what she wants - she cannot be allowed to give this information out to strangers.

That is the ugliest part: IMBRA says that foreign women should not be allowed to decide for themselves their own level of security in how they will meet a US male and what contact information they will be allowed to give him on their own free will.

There should be a petition to find a plaintiff against his law on Care2.

Sunday June 14, 2009, 7:11 pm
These last two posters couldn't have been more spot on. The idea that women are being "trafficked" through "mail order bride" companies is such a blatant lie. There is no such thing as a "mail order bride" or someone being "trafficked" through what amounts to a personals ad column. This witch hunt has to stop.

I met my wife through Cherry Blossoms and we met the way any two people would meet through a newspaper personals column. We have been married 15 years, have two beautiful sons and my wife is a successful program coordinator at her child care facility. Not bad for a submissive, child-like "modern day slave" living in "involuntary servitude".

The people who place and answer ads in these columns are mature adult men and women who fully give their consent. If any marriage occurs, it is solely up to the two consenting and willing adults. To pass laws, block credit cards and punish these people is a violation of the rights and freedoms of adult human beings who have every right to seek whom they want to date or marry.

Furthermore, these laws and egregious attacks not only inflict pain on lonely men who become limited in their options, they show a complete lack of respect for the intelligence and independence of foreign women. Every woman of every so-called "developing" country should be insulted that Sandra McQueen refers to them as "property" being "bought and sold".

Sunday June 14, 2009, 7:36 pm
Tom wrote:
"The facilitating of payments used in the recruitment and sale of mail-order brides is unregulated. All the major credit card companies are involved and have been for years. The international on-line matchmaking business appears to be thriving largely because of increased Internet use worldwide, low overhead and start-up costs, and the seemingly endless supply of eligible foreign women."

Tom, you're entire paragraph is contradictory. On one hand, you state that the "recruitment and sale of mail order brides is unregulated", apparently pleading for something to e "done" about it. You later say "the international on-line matchmaking business appears to be thriving because of increased internet use worldwide.". Which is it, Tom? Is it recruitment and sale of women into marriage, or on-line matchmaking? Those two things are very different. On-line matchmaking services, or "personals ad" columns as they were once called, give more control to the individual than even dating services such as eHarmony or Lifestyles International. So are you saying we should regulate and punish those companies as well?

You show your complete ignorance by making such irrational and nonsensical statements. Why don't you read up and study a topic before you attempt to write about it?

Monday June 15, 2009, 6:00 am

Normally I don't respond to trolls who violate care2's terms of service by personally attacking me, I just flag them. In this case I will make an exception because of the importance of the topic of Human Trafficking and the outright lies and disinformation put forth by said trolls, such as "No one is being bought, no one is being sold."

I find it amazingly coincidental that Tristan L., Jack C. and Bob T. all joined care2 on the same day (yesterday), all have blank profiles, all managed to find and comment in this post within hours of each other, all opted not to note this post, and all have the same point of view. Bob makes this clear when he says, "These last two posters couldn't have been more spot on."

Could it be that "Tristan", "Jack" and "Bob" are really the same person? Someone strangely hiding behind a veil of anonymity while claiming that "There is no such thing as a 'mail order bride' or someone being 'trafficked' through what amounts to a personals ad column"? If he really believes what he says, why and what is he hiding?

I certainly believe everyone has the right to express their own opinions, including "Bob" and his imaginary friends. But if "Bob" had bothered to "read up and study" the original petition, he would have noticed that the "irrational and nonsensical statements" that he attributes to me were written by the petition's author.

"Bob", I don't write the stories or petitions I post in the care2 news, so if you want to "show your complete ignorance" by shooting the messenger, that's fine with me. You're just shooting blanks. If you don't like the petition, don't sign it. I signed it, and I'm glad I did.

Here is some related news:

On Buying Brides with Credit Cards

The Human Trafficking blog by Amanda Kloer at Change.org in the United States declared victory on Friday in their campaign to get the credit card company Diners Club International to stop doing business with a company in Singapore that sells Vietnamese mail order brides. More than 800 people signed a petition to get Diners Club to stop making it easier to purchase women for marriage. (Read more)

Diner's Club to Break Ties to Vietnam Brides Co.

It's not every day that we get contacted by a billion-dollar corporation agreeing to change a business practice our members find ethically objectionable. But that's exactly what happened to Change.org this week. (Read more)

A License To Abuse

Maria was born in the Dominican Republic. She married a United States citizen, immigrated to this country, and obtained "conditional" resident immigration status, which enabled her to remain legally in the United States provided that she stay wedded to her spouse. Soon afterward, her husband began to brutalize her physically. "One time I had eight stitches in my head and a gash on the other side of my head, and he broke my ribs.... He would bash my head against the wall while we had sex." (Read more)

Monday June 15, 2009, 6:59 am
To "Tom". I posted above and you questioned my integrity. I made only one post, and I am Tristan Laurent, admin of www.onlinedatingrights.com, a website devoted to telling the truth about international dating and exposing lies, hysteria and witchhunts.

I am not sure how you can defeat my argument by falsely suggesting I have made it more than once. Your weak position is exposed as being even weaker if this is part of its support.

Monday June 15, 2009, 7:28 am
Spewing outrageous fabrications Hannah Prager and Tom M. have littered their stories with inaccurate, misleading and contradictory information designed to suggest that foreign “mail order brides” are being purchased by consumer American husbands with a credit card. Their assertions that the mail order bride business is heavily associated with trafficking are outrageous fabrications. Both Hannah and Tom have not provided any scientific evidence whatsoever for such incendiary statements. They have merely suggested the potential for trafficking with Tom M stating mail order brides are “susceptible to exploitive practices, including trafficking”.

The immigration process requires that US citizens who sponsor a foreign spouse on a fiancée visa must demonstrate a sincere relationship exists. The visa interview process & lengthy time required would preclude traffickers from using this pathway. Furthermore traffickers operate quietly in small groups unlike matchmaking organizations which openly broadcast thousands of women on their websites.

The women who write back are free to communicate with whomever they please and they have a choice to reject communication with unsuitable American man . Obviously this isn’t trafficking because they free to do as they please and think as they please which directly contradicts Hannah’s assertion that these foreign women are being treated as commodes who can’t think. Her views represent an outdated feminist view from the 1970’s that foreign women are so desperate they will do anything to marry an American man which robs foreign immigrant women of their intelligence, creativity, dignity and respect that they deserve.

The Washington Post wrote an expose on trafficking in Sept 2007 which revealed that Advocacy groups had sprung up around the Beltway to lap up money spent on a virtually non existent trafficking problem.

Both Tom M and Hannah appear to have an ulterior motive and getting the public fired up with a mob mentality and rush to judgement on this issue absent one shred of scientific evidence to support their phony claims. The credit card companies should return this petition marked
“return to sender”.

Monday June 15, 2009, 7:44 am



"Both Tom M and Hannah appear to have an ulterior motive and getting the public fired up with a mob mentality and rush to judgement on this issue absent one shred of scientific evidence to support their phony claims."


Firstly, Tom is one of the most decent, honest, down to earth, hard working and caring individuals you will ever meet and you have NO RIGHT to attack him or his news article!! He didn't create the petition, he just posted it.



Secondly, all you have to do is Google mail order brides and you can see the Gaziilions of sites available to order brides. DISGUSTING!!!



I think whomever you are ...you need to BACK OFF!



THNX for posting this Tom !!!!!


lyg's!!

Monday June 15, 2009, 7:44 am
To Care2 CEO Sandra McQueen,

There are clearly separate individuals who have and will be trying to weigh in on this with a balanced perspective. Tristan runs a forum about this issue and I run the Twitter account MensNews. Bob responded to a tweet.

There are good reasons why Care2 should delete this phony petition in order to preserve its credibility. There already is an unconstitutional law called IMBRA that never was necessary and is not being complied with but which the fraudulent Tahirih Justice Organization lauds as having properly regulated US-owned businesses that introduce US citizens to foreigners.

They proudly note in their FAQ that AForeignAffair.com supposedly complies with their law. That site actually profits from having to background check US males so they are not challenging the law. Does Tom want to push the envelope and force these sites to overturn the law in order to show credit card companies that what they do is perfectly legal and requires no regulation anymore than Match.com does?

Tom points out that Diner's Club stopped doing business with a particular foreign-owned business that clearly said it was not a dating agency but that it really sold women (no US firm says that nor do 99% of foreign firms - we are in a mostly civilized world).

Tom (and the folks at Change) fail to define the businesses they are targeting. I had to "sign the petition" in order to let the folks at Mastercard have some perspective.

If Tom knew even a little about this subject, he would have at least defined the offending targets as "Marriage Brokers" according to the IMBRA definition, which says "any dating site where foreigners who don't pay outnumber US members who don't pay". We all know that US women do not pay on most dating sites because it is human nature for men to finance dating (when women are under 30).

The Dominican Republican reference is a cheap anecdote because I can reference 6000 cases of US-born women abused by their domestic husbands.

It is entirely irrelevant to say that this foreign woman was beaten by this husband when the US DV rate is 7%. Studies show that US-Russian marriages have only a 1% DV rate for what it is worth.

Everyone here should please study up on this issue by reading the websites Tristan, Bob and I provided while being sure to note that the Diner's Club issue was with ONE foreign-owned business that does not represent dating websites in general that simply introduce foreigners to Americans.

Needless to say, millions of American men are proud to be married to women who were not necessarily born in the USA.

Also note: In the year 2009, it is total nonsense to say Russian women have any NEED to leave their country. Ten years ago this was true but not now. Tom would, like most US men who don't speak Russian, be rejected by 99% of Russian women under 30 whom he might try to approach in public in Russia and he would face a majority rejection rate from young women on dating sites who can chose a much younger and less feminist male for themselves.

Monday June 15, 2009, 8:42 am
Cher C has stated,
"Firstly, Tom is one of the most decent, honest, down to earth, hard working and caring individuals you will ever meet and you have NO RIGHT to attack him or his news article!! He didn't create the petition, he just posted it."

Cher, when you yell "fire" in a crowded theatre you are using a mob hysteria to achieve some kind of ulterior motive and it's not right. That's exactly whats going on here.

The issue is not whether Tom M is a good decent individual. The issue is that he has grossly mischaracterized international matchmaking and friendship - a perfectly legitimate pursuit by suggesting this activity is somehow correlated to trafficking and or the sale of foreign brides with a credit card. There has never been any scientific evidence demonstrating a connection between trafficking and international matchmaking which involves writing letters as form of communication - a legal activity. Tom M is obviously trying to conflate International matchmaking and trafficking as if they were the same to get the public fired up and motivated. That's absolutely hysterical and dangerous because once again there is absolutely no scientific evidence to support his assertions and he is asking the public to take action on this issue. That is wrong and he knows it just like the person in the theatre yelling fire.

Monday June 15, 2009, 9:43 am
Noted and signed-thanks Tom!

Monday June 15, 2009, 2:13 pm


"The issue is that he has grossly mischaracterized international matchmaking and friendship - a perfectly legitimate pursuit by suggesting this activity is somehow correlated to trafficking and or the sale of foreign brides with a credit card. "


You are speaking a bunch of nonsense... geeeeeeeeeeez what century are you living in?

Talk about being in denial!!!!


I don't believe he said EVERY international matchmaking organization but come on now.... we are talking about human beings after all and the exploitation of other human beings.... namely women.

Like I said earlier I Googled mail order brides and you CAN NOT tell me that EVERYONE one of those hundreds of sites available are ligit!!!!

OF COURSE there is human trafficking going on!!!! GEEEEZ


OPEN YOUR EYES!!!!!


And it seems to me that YOU and your colleagues were the ones to call FIRE!!!

Monday June 15, 2009, 7:01 pm
"You are speaking a bunch of nonsense... geeeeeeeeeeez what century are you living in?
Talk about being in denial!!!!
I don't believe he said EVERY international matchmaking organization but come on now.... we are talking about human beings after all and the exploitation of other human beings.... namely women".

In my mind I am truly wondering why you castigate my views that international matchmaking organizations are legitimate businesses and that "I am speaking a bunch of nonsense" by asserting these women are being not being exploited and sold into a life of indentured slavery, prostitution, etc. If these women are being sold as many of the posters on this board claim please provide some specific examples of matchmaking organizations violating the law and trafficking women. How are they trafficked and in which manner are they trafficked? But I notice you haven't supplied any such concrete information other than insisting they can't be legit.

Trafficking is an emotional subject bound to elicit heated emotions and so the public will often rush to judgement on this subject and then punish the nearest representation of a problem even if they are not involved in this horrific practice. If these women are being exploited and these so called marriage brokers are evil then provide some actual proof they are connected to trafficking. I don't believe you can provide this evidence because there is no connection between trafficking and international matchmaking organizations. Furthermore there has never been a single case of a US based international matchmaking organization even arrested for trafficking. And finally these organizations merely supply contact information and nobody is sold or traded. Why is that illegal...can you supply some specific information regarding why should this be illegal?

It would appear that the petition to "end credit card financing of mail order brides" has more to do with hidden agendas rather than the truth.

Tuesday June 16, 2009, 12:18 am
I'm glad Cher sees the possibility of making a distinction on what sites Mastercard is supposed to stop supporting. The way Tom wrote it...he would want Match.com to remove foreign women from their listings and want Craigslist to lose its priveleges for promoting prostitution and that whole ball of wax - if he wanted to save women from a life of prostitution he would be doing a petition against Craigslist but he won't because of his politics - Care2 would be in trouble with its own readers is someone asked others to sign petitions against strip clubs for instance (even though US strip clubs regularly sponsor Russian women on student visas and then tell them they will be fired if they exchange contact info with customers).

It's all politics.

The Hidden Agenda is a War against Men Dating Younger Women that has been going on since the 1980s when the women of the sexual revolution found their male peers were having sex with a new generation, including interns, personal assistants and their students in colleges.

The opening salvo in the war were workplace "harrassment" laws that would have been fine except the real agenda was getting it established, successfully, that even if an employee wanted to have sex, young women could not really decide for themselves because they might not have had "options".

What was really going on is that the men's wives wanted to decide for young women how they would behave toward their husbands in the workplace.

Then the call came out that college professors must not sleep with an adult student taking one of his classes. Everyone agreed with that somehow, but the Hidden Agenda made sure that professors couldn't sleep with anyone enrolled at the entire college...unless that woman was over 35 of course. Many male professors left the USA at that point - that kind of policy strives to completely control whom a man is supposed to be attracted to and seeks to destroy his career if he does not obey.

The Monica Lewinsky scandal would help control some ridiculous men in the Republican Party. It was shocking how quickly otherwise intelligent males switched their thinking from one where they resisted "feminism" to one where they completely adopted the idea that it was wrong to date an intern (Clinton's being married or lying seemed to have nothing to do with their disdain).

And just when the Hidden Agenda was winning...the Internet and low air fares allowed men to end-run the system.

You can see that the war against men dating younger women is not going to end anytime soon.

Take a look at the official NOW condemnation of Letterman: They said that the main problem was the imagery of a 30+ baseball player with an 18 year old Bristol Palin. They said that the age difference was equal to "violence". The NOW doesn't bother making the Hidden Agenda hidden anymore.

Bottom line: Secure US women shouldn't worry about younger competition. If we can eliminate the Hidden Agenda, we can work together to stop real human trafficking.

Tuesday June 16, 2009, 2:26 am
Well I hope that 'war' against men dating younger women is over - My husband is 34 years older than me !!
:-)

Wednesday June 17, 2009, 7:02 am
On Sunday, June 14, 2009 I posted an explanation of the issues involved in this campaign on this forum. The posting was rational, respectful and not violative of any TOS of this website. The post, however, did not agree with Tom M.'s position and it challenged his views. This morning I discovered that the post has been deleted. (Proof that I had made a post that was deleted is in my one post above that has not been deleted in which I refer to my previous, deleted, post. In any event, I have captured a snapshot of this forum and I will use it to prove that this website only allows certain views to be published.)

I demand that anyone with admin powers over this forum explain to me the reason that my post was deleted. Readers should know that postings here can be removed if they do not agree with Tom M's opinion. Here is the post I made that was deleted:

The premise of this story is a hoax, and those who are burning anyone involved in international dating are on a witchhunt. Men and women meet each other all over the world, sometimes now by internet. Dating companies facilitate meeting by charging a fee to access their service or by the number of people one wishes to contact. Some men - and some women - choose to contact people from other cultures, other countries this way. No one is being bought, no one is being sold. It is ludicrous to suggest that because a woman chooses to post her profile on an international dating company website who then receives an email from a man in another country and who subsequently meets and chooses to marry the man that this is proof she is being sold.

No dating company has ever been charged by any law enforcement agency with "trafficking" women into the US. And the Washington Post did an expose in 2007 which revealed that the entire anti-trafficking "industry" is a fraud which sprang up like mushrooms in the forest to lap up the gobs of money the government is throwing around to anyone who says they are fighting trafficking, even if they never manage to find a single trafficked woman. (Think about that last statement: If there are so many women trafficked here, where are they all? Is it reasonable to believe that none of them have ever escaped and gone to the authorities? Not one?) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/22/AR2007092201401_pf.html

Moreover, calling a woman a "mail order bride" is demeaning and not atypical of Americans who view non-Americans of being inferior; in this case the suggestion is that only an American woman can be smart enough and resourcful enough to protect herself from men but foreign women are stupid and helpless. And of course they are all poor and desperate because, after all, they are not Americans. And, oh, yes, all these foreign women speak (at least) two languages, one more than most American women. At least no one can say that they are inferior linguisticly.

The truths about this issue can be better understood with some statistics and not hysteria, starting with statistics gathered by a 1999 INS study called the Scholes report that revealed that the abuse rate in international marriages fomented by the internet is 1/7 the abuse rate among domestic marriages. Also, the study showed that the divorce rate is 20%. Hmmm, maybe we should be attacking American dating and promoting foreign dating. http://www.online-dating-rights.com/index.php?ind=downloads&op=section_view&idev=7

Also, several anthropologists have individually spent years studying these relationships and interviewing hundreds of American men, foreign women, dating company owners, women's groups and government officials and they all state that meeting via internet like this is just another choice that both the men and women involved make in order to find romance. Here are a few quotes from Anthropology Professor Nicole Constable's book, "Romance on a Global Stage".
"Men and their perspectives, I learned, are - like the women - often misunderstood or glossed in stark and stereotypical terms."

"I have come to see the men involved in correspondence relationships as a very diverse group of people; many are decent and well-intentioned human beings who have learned a great deal in the process of their relationships."

"Many went to great lengths to ensure their partner's comfort and happiness in the United States."

"Troubling to some critics is that many women who opt to marry US men express a preference to remain at home and not to work if there is no financial incentive to do so, and a willingness to define themselves primarily as wives and mothers."

"Mail order brides are often depicted as buying into images of their own subservience and marrying out of economic depression. These views are seriously flawed for their orientalist, essentializing and universalizing tendencies, which reflect many now-outdated feminist views of the 1970s."

"Anti-trafficking NGOs often include mail order brides among the ranks of trafficked women. Definitions of mail order brides, as discussed below, are often so broad as to be meaningless."

"Women may quite literally put their best face forward, but the market metaphor [that women are being sold] should not be taken literally in this context. Would this metaphor be applied to western women and men who use dating services or place personal ads, or does it reflect more pejorative assumptions about foreign or Third World women?"

"Assuming that Asian women are objects who are bought and sold...is not only a bad feminist argument, but it is one that fits with the most demeaning and essentializing images of mail order brides. Such images rob women of their ability to express intelligence, resistance, creativity, independence, dignity and strength."

"Overall I argue that women involved in correspondence relationships are not merely pawns of global political economy or the victims of sexual exploitation, nor are men simply the agents of western sexual imperialism."

Wednesday June 17, 2009, 12:51 pm
Look, you can call me a troll if you want, but I am only interested in honest and reliable reporting. I want the truth to be told.

Also, your claim that Jack C., Tristan and I are the same person is utterly absurd. If you read our posts, you can tell that the three of us have very different writing styles. I would have to be awfully schizophrenic to pull off pretending to be all three people.

This petition, and your article, make the claim that women are being trafficked through international introduction services. In order for a person to be trafficked they have to be

a. Coerced or pressured against their will

-or-

b. Lured by fraud and deception, and then held against their will.

The idea that people can be trafficked through a personals ad column is ridiculous, and you will agree with me if you give the matter a little thought. Did you know that many Southeast Asian and Latin American women also advertise in Match, Yahoo Personals, local newspaper personals columns and religious singles clubs like Christian Singles International. They also used to (and may still) advertise in the Sheela Wood column, a personals ad column published in supermarket tabloids. Would you advocate also closing these businesses?

It is simply not possible to traffic people this way.

Paying a fee for the right to post messages on a message board is not the same as paying a fee for an arranged marriage, as the term "trafficking" would suggest. If you think that businesses should be closed simply because they allow people to place and answer personal ads then you are so against free-speech that you violate the very foundation of our democracy.

Thursday June 18, 2009, 5:40 pm
Tom, thank you for posting this petition. I didn't sign it only because I already signed the other one on change.org before I spotted this one. Either way, you might like to know that the men who are attacking this petition are virtually all members of an online dating rights group that has put your link up and asked its members to put nasty posts on here, their extremist views do not represent the rest of the population. The reason they all joined the same day and haven't done any other actions is because they were recruited on their web forum.

When I went to their forum to check it out, http://www.online-dating-rights.com/forum/index.php?topic=1677.10, I was treated to an angry diatribe by these same men about this petition, about you, and about several of us who had posted on the change.org website. In other words, don't take them seriously. I started to debate one of them, but decided my energy was better used for signing petitions such as this.
Thanks for everything you do!
Romy

Thursday June 18, 2009, 6:04 pm
The word "extremist" is very subjective. It all depends on your point of view.

There was a time not long ago when shutting down a business simply because it offers personals ad listings of people outside the U.S. would have been considered "extremist". If that is no longer true today, then that is a sad commentary on our society.

Look, I understand your alarm. You've been told that businesses sell women into arranged marriages. You've been told that underage girls are advertised for marriages on some web sites. You've been told that women are lured, deceived and coerced into coming here, and held against their will. If I honestly believed these things were going on then I'd be the first to sign the petition.

I met my wife through Cherry Blossoms. We've been married for 15 years and have two beautiful sons. When my wife arrived I treated her like a queen, bought her a car, taught her to drive and bent over backwards to give her all of the love, support and help she needed. When she wanted to go to school to further her education, I supported her 100%. Today, 15 years into our marriage, she is the program coordinator at her daycare facility where she started as a pre-school instructor a decade ago. I resent being stigmatized and told by you people that I am a "trafficker" and that my wife is a "purchased bride". I know for a fact that Cherry Blossoms doesn't engaged in any of the unethical practices that you're claiming all of these so-called "mail order bride" services engage in. I'm just thankful to them that they gave me a new lease on life, helped me find a loving companion, and gave me some happiness in this life.

If you're petition had put Cherry Blossoms out of business in 1991 I'd probably be an old lonely man today with no hope of finding anybody.

So flame me, call me a troll, discredit the organizations I belong to and tag us all as "extremists". I just don't see the crime in helping lonely people find companionship and happiness. I'm sorry if that's extreme to you people.

Thursday June 18, 2009, 8:25 pm
There seems to be no end to the misinformation on this website. I am the admin of a website, but I do not recognize any of the other posters on this one and thus I am the only one from that site to post here. Remy's alarmist statement about this was thus completely false.

Remy's statement that on my site people were asked to make nasty comments here is also false. Nor did she debate any of us as she said she started to do. This is not a surprise as she would not be able to win a debate by making a presentation of only false facts.

Oh, yes, one more thing. On my website anyone can post, regardless of whether they agree with my opinion. But on this site, I had my original post deleted because I disagreed with "Tom" M.

My site is www.onlinedatingrights.com

Thursday June 18, 2009, 11:57 pm
My debate was not on your forum, Tristan. I was debating with Delphi_Pro on change.org about this very issue. If this name sounds familiar to you it's because both of you posted to both the change.org petition and your forum, along with some of the others, and he is a "senior member" of your website.

I would like to apologize for my remark that you had requested nasty comments, because I realize that I misread the following paragraph: "Please consider flooding this petition with letters of your own refusing this absolute madness. I sent a letter myself, deleting the "form" letter and inserting my own text. You may want to use my letter as a template, or write your own." This was a comment by Delphi_Pro in your forum, and was not a request to post to this forum. So I do stand corrected and I am more than happy to admit when I am wrong. However, I stand by the rest of my comments.

As far as you Bob... I was touched by your post. I think it is great that you have found real happiness with someone and you sound like a loving and respectful husband. Furthermore, I never called you a trafficker. However, I believe that these businesses set women up for exploitation, and that enough of the people using them are traffickers that it has become a concern to the U.S. Senate. It's pretty bad when the senate has to consider a law making it illegal for someone to apply for multiple fiancee visas at the same time. How many fiancees does one man need to import at one time? And why do some of these agencies have "lifetime" memberships, yet guarantee you'll be married within a year? Why would a guy need a lifetime membership under those circumstances?

This same law would make it mandatory for men seeking foreign women to disclose their criminal history regarding abuse. Why is this unreasonable when they automatically give much more private information than this about the women to the men? Yet some of the men on Tristan's forum have a problem with that. If someone has good intentions, why would that be a problem? If your sister were dating a guy from a foreign country, and considering moving there with no language skills, or other resources, I think you would want her to know as much about the guy as possible.

Those of us who support this petition, Bob, are not supporting it because of guys like you. We just feel that there needs to be further regulation. I also don't wish to see anyone become a lonely old guy. :)

Friday June 19, 2009, 6:00 am
Romy: Since you use the word "trafficker," I assume you have a clear idea of what qualifies a person to be labeled as such. So, what exactly are the activities of this person, this trafficker?

Yes, its clear that you believe that "these businesses" set women up for exploitation. In fact, entire organizations have convinced themselves of that belief to the point of mob hysteria only to be placated with million of dollars of taxpayer money. Since we now understand that you are acting on your beliefs, going forward we also understand that you are not necessarily motivated by facts.

So lets follow the train of thought here. You believe that certain businesses set women up for exploitation and some users (members) of those businesses are traffickers (to be defined by you). Are these users already traffickers before they become members or do they discover the opportunity to be traffickers after they become members?

It seems that you are linking the application for multiple visas as a form of trafficking. Does the official definition of human trafficking make reference to that? Where in any law passed by the Senate does it state that international matchmaking organizations are involved in trafficking? How exactly does a man "import" a person? If I want to import a person, what procedure must be followed?

Unfortunately, people do get divorced. In fact, Americans are very good at it given the hight rate here. There is less chance that divorce will occur when married to a foreign women; however, if it does happen, the man may wish to try again, like most people do, and the matchmaking website is offering that chance. As for the "guarantee," I believe Match.com pioneered that business concept.

Where is it stated that it is unreasonable for a man to disclose his criminal record as part of the immigration process? Where on Tristan's forum has any man stated he has a problem with that? If any man from that forum has a problem with that and has not yet stated his position, then he should come to this forum and say so.

You say that there needs to be further regulation. Exactly what new regulation should be considered?


.

Friday June 19, 2009, 6:46 am
I just wrote a book here but Care2 programmers hadn't thought of allowing people to keep the text when they are timed out - so it was all lost. This bug needs to be fixed. I wasn't smart enough to copy to clipboard before submitting.

So the short form.

1) Romy - Thanks for trying to sound reasonable. This Jon guy is apparently the 5th man to dissent on this in writing. More are writing to Mastercard to ask that they know the real facts about these innocent dating sites.

2) Sandra McQueen - CEO of Care2 - Please ask your lawyers if you should follow the Yelp policy about allowing companies slandered by your members to have a fully equal rebuttal of the charges.

3) Romy - You have 2 major facts wrong

A) IMBRA forces background checks not only at the immigration stage but before two people can say HELLO to each other. Then it forces women who do not have constant access to email, to sign in writing before a man can call them or send a telegram. The Commerce Clause, referring to US vs Carolene Products, does not allow the feds to regulate a business's customers like that. Imagine if you were carded at a bar but then the bartender had to card you every time you wanted to say hello to someone else in the bar - and showed your personal information to the stranger and had that stranger have to sign in writing that it was OK to talk to you?

Foreign women don't mind being told as much as possible about a guy, but what they do mind is if a man is in Moscow on a Saturday and they won't read their email until they get to work on Monday, that the man be able to phone them and get to know them before he takes a flight home to the USA on Monday when they could officially sign any IMBRA affidavit that they read a man's background check.

The following story really happened. A man was told he could meet a woman at 9:15 after she came in at 9AM to read and sign his clean background check (99% of the background check is on the honor system so of course they're all going to be clean). The employee arrived at 9:20 to find the man and the woman chatting ooutside the locked agency door. The employee went wild trying to physically force them apart screaming that they were violating the IMBRA law - a law from another country 10,000 miles away.

Needless to say that employee was fired. Few agencies comply with IMBRA fully as a result of such ridiculous events.

Even the Tahirih Justice Center admits that the wording of the law could have allowed for women to make voice recording approvals.

B) IMBRA says that you cannot marry more than 2 foreigners per LIFETIME not "at the same time". Of course you cannot say you want to commit polygamy by bringing multiple foreigners to the USA at the same time. Policy already existed against that.

Do you think it is fair that you, Romy, cannot marry more than 2 foreign men per LIFETIME now? IMBRA goes far beyond whether you met on a dating site or not. This clause applies to all Americans.

Sure you can ask for a waiver Romy...but do you think the federal government should be allowed to be strong enough to tell you whom you can marry?

Plus, foreign men who haven't yet met Romy cannot, under IMBRA, ask for a waiver because they don't have a Blackberry in their hands but want Romy to be able to phone them on a weekend without their having to sign an IMBRA document in writing first.

Please help at least change the peition to one that asks Mastercard to check carefully whether a dating site is legit or not.

Friday June 19, 2009, 8:53 am
First of all, I want to think you Romy for your polite and considerate response. I've been in some nasty shootouts with people in the past, so I appreciate it when I get a reasoned response.

Most of my responses on the various forums, including at OnlineDatingRights, are in response to the myriad of academic papers and other research, some of it published in law journals, that attacks international dating agencies and their clients with defamatory and slanderous language, calling them "traffickers", "consumer-husbands", "purchased brides" and "trafficked brides". Sometimes I get carried away responding to these alligations, and I apologize if I've used eccentric language in the past. I've recently made a commitment to tone down my rhetoric and stop using perjoratives, but it's a process and sometimes I slip. It's all too easy to fight fire with fire.

Moreover, I have never, and would never, make inflammatory remarks that degrade women in general. I think that shows an utter lack of respect and maturity and reflects very negatively on a person's character.

I do stand by my claims that much of the language in most of these papers is unfounded and uncalled for, and the labels they use are metaphorical and not literal.

I am all for providing women with the knowledge and information they need to arm themselves and make informed decisions to protect against the dangers that lurk. No sane and civilized person would argue against this.

I think most of the concerns about IMBRA fall into several categories:

1. Logistics. We all want to protect people, but it's not necessary to stop them from meeting altogether. IMBRA would have been impossible to comply with just 15 years ago when most people communicated through paper letter writing. It can take two weeks for a single letter to cross the ocean, so an additional letter exchange to sign and return a consent form would require almost a MONTH before two people could be introduced. Many dating agencies have simply taken the step of deleting tens of thousands of members from their database simply because they do not have an email address. This is a concern for some people.

2. Equal protection. Some dating agencies, like Match, Yahoo and others, are exempt from IMBRA regulations, which doesn't set well. People are constantly second guessing which agency complies with IMBRA, which one doesn't and which ones don't have to. If someone makes the wrong choice they could be in for lengthy delays or have their visa denied altogether. A fairer approach is to make people individually responsible for diseminating their background and criminal information at the appropriate time before a visa application is filed. This way, no matter how you meet someone, whether through a dating agency, a hobby forum, a trip over there or by floating a message in a bottle across the ocean, each person filing for a spouse petition plays by the same rules.

3. Precedent. I think some people are concerned that it won't end with IMBRA. There is a myriad of academic research, as I said before, that puts horrible labels on foreign dating agencies and their clients. If government takes these claims literally, then it very well may result in a proposed ban on them altogether.

4. Lifetime Visa limit. Again there are concerns here. I agree with you that people with concurrent fiance visa applications on record are playing games and should be stopped. However, I think there should be an appropriate time limit and an expiration date for old visa applications. If someone tragically loses a husband or wife years later, and meets another foreigner, they shouldn't be punished. I also think subsequent visa applications should be considered on an individual basis and the circumstances taken into consideration.

And like I said before, if there are agencies out there who arrange marriages, advertise children for marriage or participate in organized schemes to lure women into prostitution then those businesses should be shut down and the owners brought to justice. I am absolutely for that and would sign that petition in a minute.

Friday June 19, 2009, 10:14 am
WOW, this is a hot topic. I have been thoughtfully reading each of these posts, and believe that most of the posters make very good points. Jon B., the definition of a trafficker is as follows:

Based on the above definition of the UN Protocol, the National Plan of Action on the Elimination of Trafficking in Women and Children, formulated by Presidential Decree No: 88 Year 2002, defines trafficking as
“trafficking in persons encompassing all forms of action undertaken by perpetrators of trafficking that have one or more elements of recruiting, transporting between regions and countries, transferring, sending, receiving and temporary placement or placement at their destination of
people by using threats, verbal and physical abuse, abduction, fraud, deception, misuse of vulnerability (e.g. if someone has no alternative, is isolated, is addicted to drugs, trapped in debt), giving or receiving payments or profits in cases in which a person is used for prostitution and sexual exploitation (including paedophilia), legal or illegal migrant workers, child adoptions, fishing platform work, mail order brides,
domestic helpers, begging, pornography, drug dealing, selling of body organs as well as other forms of exploitation.”

There is a fine line between meeting someone online from a different country who happens to be vulnerable and disadvantaged, or being someone who is looking to exploit that person. I believe the difference is intent. Some of the people who have posted on here appear to have very good intent. Unfortunately, many don't.

Next, Jon, you asked me if people become traffickers before or after they use international dating services. How facetious. How would you or I know exactly when an individual person becomes a trafficker? I think some people have good intent and many people do not.

As far as the multiple visas, I can see if it's a woman and her children, but why more than one fiancee visa. You asked me how one "imports" a person. Again, facetious. I don't use international dating sites, and I have never personally dealt with "importing" a person, a cold term to say the least.

The guarantee is stupid. How can you guarantee someone they will find true love within a certain time frame? Match.com is stupid for that too. But the lifetime membership? I would hope if someone got married and found true love, he (or she) would no longer need a lifetime membership. And if they lost their spouse, hopefully their first thought would not be, "well, at least I've still got that lifetime membership and I can get a replacement." People are not commodies, unless of course you are a trafficker.

Jon, you asked where on Tristan's forum any man has written complaining about disclosing his criminal history. Here are some quotes:

"The IMBRA law says that American men cannot meet foreign women without the man being background checked. That means control of American men by feminist women. How can you guys fall for propaganda like that?" by VeteransAbroad.

""Zauderer v. Office of Disciplinary Counsel, 471 U.S. 626, 651 & n.14 (1985) upheld a requirement that an attorney's contingent fees ad mention that unsuccessful plaintiffs might still be liable for court costs. This is what Judge Clarence Cooper used to justify that dating sites warn women of a man's entire background including sex offender check...and get signed approval." also by VeteransAbroad.

There were other whiny comments about having to provide criminal history but I don't have room for them here.

As far as what regulations I would like to see happen, it would be nice to see all dating services regulated to ensure the safety of all its members. International dating sites pose an additional risk because it's a lot easier for someone to leave an abuser if they are not in a foreign country with a culture and language barrier.

Jack, comparing the online dating services of background checks to being carded in a bar is really a stretch. If you are being deceitful, you might be an underage drinker in a bar. What if you are being deceitful with the intent to bring someone here with no other resources. I think you catch my drift. You can thank the traffickers for the cumbersome laws. As far as marrying two foreigners in a lifetime, if I were intent on marrying more than one foreign person in a lifetime, I guess I would move to that country, adopt their culture, and give up my American citizenship. You know, people are just people everywhere. There are men and women of all types in every culture, and being determined to marry a "foreigner" smacks of racism, in and of itself. I would hope people wouldn't base their dating choices solely on what country someone's from, but that's their problem, not mine. And if any foreign men wanted to meet me, sorry, I already have a really good man!

Bob, I agree pretty much with all your points. The internet has changed all of our lives. It does make the laws more complicated. I do not object to Americans marrying people from other countries, that's great, whatever! What I do object to is people using these dating sites to bring vulnerable women and children here and exploiting, harming, and even killing them. For that reason, there needs to be protections in place. I would not object to seeing similar safeties in place for local dating services, altho I don't think it's as critical since in most cases, women aren't leaving their homeland with no resources to date someone local online. Meeting anyone online is a sketchy and risky activity at best anyway.

I also appreciate your acknowledgment that sometimes these conversations are not very polite. When I visited Tristan's forum, I was amazed by some of the ignorance, the racism, the homophobia, even repeated nasty remarks about the Bahai faith. Doesn't give me the impression that these are intelligent, educated, equal-minded men. Certainly not the kind of guys I'd want my daughter to date, much less move to another country and marry. Believe me, those people do not help your cause any with their adolescent rantings.

There, nuff said. I think I've answered anybody. I never intended to get into a lengthy discussion about this, but I wanted to respond. Wish you all a good day.

Friday June 19, 2009, 10:03 pm
Romy wrote

There is a fine line between meeting someone online from a different country who happens to be vulnerable and disadvantaged, or being someone who is looking to exploit that person. I believe the difference is intent. Some of the people who have posted on here appear to have very good intent. Unfortunately, many don't.

Response

Does that mean, in your opinion, a man is a trafficker based on his intent? Lets go with that. So then, its not the dating website that is the trafficker. I am with you so far since after all, they are merely providing a platform for communication. It is potentially the man living in the next town, or next door, or the guy in the office down the hall from you at work. It could be the guy chatting with you on line at the grocery store. They are among us, lurking. Out in the open, in the shadows, they are everywhere. If they look to another country, or perhaps the Ozarks in Tennessee with the intent to marry and exploit, they are....a trafficker.

But what if they start out having good intent and therefore not in trafficking mode? Later, they decide to exploit their nubile treasure from paradise...so do they transform into a trafficker? Maybe the guy causes his wife emotional abuse by watching too much sports on the weekend. Yes, he is a weekend trafficker.

But wait, trafficking is illegal. So if their intent is to exploit, then they are criminals in violation of the law. But no man who met his wive via communication enabled by an online dating site has ever been arrested for or even charged with the crime of trafficking. What's up with law enforcement in this country!

You know, all this time, I thought traffickers were organized groups working in foreign countries. Romy, thanks to you, I stand corrected.

Regarding background checks:

Yep, she dug around Tristan's site and managed to dig up some objections to background checks. Well, it is a fact that all objections are in reference to the UPFRONT BACKGROUND CHECKS REQUIRED TO BE SUPPLIED TO A FOREIGN WOMAN BEFORE SHE IS PERMITTED TO COMMUNICATE WITH AN AMERICAN MAN. The operative word here is BEFORE. No matter what you find Romy, no man objects to background checks as part of the immigration process. Now, if you are in favor of background checks AS A CONDITION OF COMMUNICATION then say so. If you do not say so, it is assumed that you do not support CONDITIONAL COMMUNICATION since any rational person would not. If you do support it, please state why you do and why no man should object to it.

Romy, you say that we can thank thank the traffickers for the cumbersome laws. What traffickers are you referring to and what law? What law states (in the law itself) that its premise is trafficking regarding the regulation of international dating sites?

Friday June 19, 2009, 11:23 pm
Jon, you are talking in circles. I will try to address your questions one at a time. First of all, I am not saying that dating sites are not traffickers. By aiding and abeting people who are using their services for nefarious deeds (I like that phrase, don't you?), they are helping to traffick women and children into bad situations. What I did say is that not every single man who wishes to date overseas women is a trafficker, but based on the legal definition I provided in my last post, some are.

Your second paragraph was so sarcastic that it didn't even make sense, so I'm not going to address it.

After several instances in which women and their children were brought here and abused, some even murdered, it became apparent that the background checks were necessary. They also put in provisions, I believe, to give the women information in their native language about domestic violence. I believe that the current laws in place regarding background checks are in the best interest of the women, and there is no reason they should not be supplied with the background check information before becoming involved with someone who might be dangerous. You can call it "conditional communication" if you want. I call it trying to stop abuse and exploitation. I support it completely.

As far as the cumbersome laws, I was referring to Bob T.'s complaints about the red tape involved in international dating. And yes, you can thank the people who have brought women and children here with the false intent of giving them a better life, then harming them. That is human trafficking, by legal definition. Those laws would not be necessary if people had not used the services to hurt other people. You can't tell me the dating sites aren't aware of that. They are complicit in the exploitation, not only by their silence, but worse yet, by posting sexually provocative pictures of the women, and minor children, like they are objects rather than humans. I guess there needs to be a law. They are not going to try to put a stop to an abusive practice from which they are profitting. If they gave a rat's butt about any of the women, they would have put safeguards into place themselves but the law had to do it.

Please forgive me if I don't answer any more of your questions for a couple days. It's a weekend and I plan to enjoy myself with my family, rather than argue with strangers online (silly me!). Anti-oppression work is kind of a hobby of mine, and I'm very glad I signed the petition. I hope that you have a great weekend as well.

Saturday June 20, 2009, 6:24 am
Yes, its a conspiracy! Dating sites are traffickers in consort with nefarious evildoers (I like that term even more, don't you?). Of course, if the man uses the services of Match.com, he is not a trafficker no matter his intent....well according to the law since the feminist lobby refused to regulate Match.com under IMBRA. Unless of course you believe that Match.com is aiding and abetting traffickers. If so, lets start a petition to shame the Tahirih Justice Center and Legal Momentum (National Organization for Women) to modify IMBRA. Since the passage of IMBRA, Match.com aided and abetted William Smith when he murdered Jana Claudia Menendez:

http://www.macnewsworld.com/perl/board/mboard.pl?board=ecttalkback&display=1&id=15570&thread=9600&tview=collapsed&mview=threaded

Here is the text of the article
_______________________________________________________

MATCH.COM EXEMPTION UNDER IMBRA LEADS TO MURDER OF FOREIGN WOMAN

For reasons unknown, IMBRA expressly exempts dating sites such as Match.com and Yahoo Personals from the law despite their large vulnerable foreign women memberships. In 2007, this exemption enabled William Trickett Smith, an American, to utilize Match.com to contact Jana Claudia Menendez, a Peruvian, without the condition of providing background information to Match.com prior to enabling free-speech communication. Smith and Melendez married in 2007 and she was found murdered that same year. Trickett is now being extradited to Peru to stand trial for her murder.

The Tahirih "justice" Center, the National Organization for Women, Legal Momentum, the Protection Project all have blood on their hands. They purposely protected Match.com rather than the foreign women they claim to protect.

It is now time to regulate all dating agencies that have foreign women members who can be accessed by American men. Or perhaps another murder is needed to convince you.
_________________________________________________________

Yes, lets get that petition started. Good luck. Ticketmaster owns Match.com and they run a very lucrative business; having to abide by IMBRA will be very costly for them.

Romy wrote:
...background checks are in the best interest of the women, and there is no reason they should not be supplied with the background check information before becoming involved with someone...

I did not know that writing an email to someone 12,000 miles away in a foreign country constitutes "becoming involved." Fascinating.

Saturday June 20, 2009, 6:55 am
Romy, I partly see your point about the lifetime 2-visa limit. I agree that someone who loses and loved one and can't wait to get online to meet someone else is definitely suspect (and would be under investigation by me if I were a cop!). However, if someone loses a loved one and years later meets someone on a business trip in Paris, why should he or she have problems getting another fiance visa because they have a prior one? That is why I think there should at least be an expiration date on fiance visas, or a consideration of the circumstances surrounding the new application.

I don't agree that someone who prefers men or women from a particular country or culture is necessarily racist. People have all kinds of preferences. There are cultural aspects of certain countries that may attract some people. If my kids, being raised by a Philippine mother, were suddenly motherless I would want to give them a mother who understands and appreciates the culture they were raised in. I shouldn't have to live in the Philippines and make them go to school there in order to give them that mother. That is just one reason why someone may want to go back to another country to re-marry if they're ever in a situation to do so. I have a cousin who married two men from Jamaica. She just, for whatever reason, prefers men from there. She also had a half-Jamaican son, which I'm sure contributed to her choice. She is definitely not racist.

Saturday June 20, 2009, 7:04 am
Please pardon my typoes. It's hard to edit comments before publishing them in this tiny window.

Correction: lose a loved one (not and)
Correction: She also has (not had) a Jamaican half son.

Saturday June 20, 2009, 7:24 am
I'm really on a roll today, aren't I? I meant half-Jamaican son. I think I need to go take some smart pills.

Saturday June 20, 2009, 9:52 pm
In short, I can’t support this or any other petition until I can be sure what your definition of "trafficking" is. Is it really trafficking, or just an innocent personal introduction service with demographics that some find objectionable? Are terms like "buying a bride" meant literally, or are they used as metaphors (He "bought" his wife in Thailand because she "married him for his money"). Is the business model of foreign-focused personal introduction services really that different from Match or Yahoo personals, or are they considered "trafficking" operations simply because they cross a magic 50% foreign female membership "tipping point" or have too many women from poor and backward countries advertising on them?

The sad truth is that real crime rings that kidnap and lure women and girls into prostitution and sex slavery don't take credit cards anyway, because they have no way to. They're just like illegal drug dealers. You can't go online and order marijuana or heroin from a dealer who takes your Mastercard and ships your order to your house; you can't go online and order a real prostitute or sex slave from an out-in-the open service either. The people who really have something to hide are hiding. They're certainly not showing up in Google searches.

Furthermore, if someone does use a legitimate personals service to lure and entrap someone, the business has no knowledge or role in it. You don't hold a newspaper liable if someone purchases a car that turns out to be a lemon; you can't hold a dating service liable if someone misuses it. The "trafficker" is the guy himself. He answered an online personal. He could have taken out a classified ad in a local newspaper, distributed fliers around town or just showed up. This very web site has people posting messages to meet romantic partners, as does every forum on the Internet. There are a million ways an abusive man can meet and exploit a woman; to punish one venue is irresponsible at best.

If you shut down legitimate businesses then only innocent people will suffer. Criminals will continue to do business unabated.

Sunday June 21, 2009, 3:22 am
Bob -

You are naive not to know that Mastercard proudly serves all brothels in Europe and Asia, including the German and Dutch ones like Yab Yum in Amsterdam and the ultra-elite Relax in Hamburg that are both packed with Polish women.

Mastercard also gladly services the major US strip club chains where, if a woman likes you, she will meet you on an off day for $300 (that part in cash). Mastercard and Diners Club proudly serve the Bunny Ranch in Nevada and the Doll House in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina which is probably frequented by the hypocrital DA who mouthed off against Craigslist.

Craigslist also takes Mastercard and Diner's Club for ads from foreign prostitutes who give their home address and phone numbers to Americans...immune from the IMBRA law's prohibition on foreign women giving Americans their contact info...because Craigslist doesn't talk of possible marriage you see.

Only a naive person thinks that the Marxist feminists and their sycophants really worry about foreign women "selling themselves". They are fine with pornography and prostitution as long as women rent themselves out by the half hour rather than what they see as a lifetime (marriage). The left wing benefactors of foreign women feel that prostitutes have more control of their lives than "stupid" women who marry American men presumably for life (eeewww, who would want to do that).

Marxist feminists see marriage as slavery and the fight against marriage agencies as part of the fight against that.

By the way, Romy, this fight (and IMBRA) concentrates on potential "Domestic Violence' not "Human Trafficking". The law and the Marxist lawyers who are preparing to defend it (+ Judge Coopers ridiculous decision) are all about how a man might beat up his wife and tie her to a cage in the basement...human trafficking would mean that the husband rents the wife out to other men by the half hour against her will...something that I don't think has ever happened and certainly not from the kind of white middle class US male who uses these dating sites.

So I have to ask the CEO of Care2 once again (along with Tom and Romy):

1) Will you or won't you change the petitition to also ask Mastercard to stop working with German and Dutch brothels that employee Polish women??

Yes or NO?

2) Even the Tahirih Justice Center (that concentrates on persecuting these dating sites) agrees that the term "Mail Order Bride" is racist and meant to belittle foreign women.

So will you or won't you change the petition to at least say "so-called Mail Order Bride" - This term is to foreign women like the N words is for African Americans.

In fact, your racist use of this word makes my Russian girlfriend's blood boil. It is not right for a supposedly up and coming Social Network like Care2 to use the N word or the MOB word like this.

3) That racist photo must go! You insult all Asian women by presenting them as ugly lower class wards of US feminists who apparently aren't allowed to speak in their own countries in their own language (which is where an American man would have to spend a year getting to know her).

How is that photo representative of Asian women? It certainly isn't representative of the women on those dating sites! In fact, the worst thing you can say about the dating sites is that they do not post profiles of unattractive women. That's unfair and you could probably win a lawsuit against one of them for doing that.

And this question needs to be answered by Care2 Management:

Did that woman give permission for her photo to be vandalized like that or did she, because she looks more impoverished than the upper middle class women you see on the actual dating sites, take money for that photo to be taken because she badly needed that money and did not know how feminists would abuse her likeness in ideological campaigns like this that make her look like a helpless fool?

Sunday June 21, 2009, 8:31 am
Wow, this is really eye opening. If it is true that Mastercard and Diner's Club honor brothels and strip clubs, then why is there an attack against them honoring services that simply introduce people for dating?

I agree with the previous poster that the photo at the top of this page is demeaning, belittling and offensive to foreign women who prefer to date foreigners, as well as the men who date them. It seems to depict a child with her mouth taped shut who is being forced to have sex with business clients. It is not at all representative of my wife or anyone I know who met and married through a foreign introduction service.

You people hate stereotypes. The very foundation of feminism is based on a battle against stereotypes that typecast women as "mothers", "housewives", "teachers", "nurses", and other "traditional" female roles. Yet you typecast all men who meet women from other countries as "traffickers" and "bride purchasers". This is a bit unfair, I think. My Philippine wife would be deeply offended by the photo on top, and the ignorant remarks about "mail order brides" and "human trafficking", if she even cared about this stuff.

Like I've alluded to a million times, if you succeeded in shutting down every single business you deem as a "mail order bride" service, people from all over the world would manage to meet anyway through a myriad of online and newspaper personals columns, social networking sites and web forums. You simply cannot stop people from crossing international borders to meet and fall in love.

Would you be for a ban on all international marriages? If you had an ad in Match or Yahoo Personals and a handsome hunk or sophisticated socialite from Ireland or the UK answered your profile, would you willingly relinquish your freedom to meet and possibly date/marry him because it's "mail order bride" selling? Would you impose the same restrictions on yourselves that you seem to be suggesting for women from Asia and Latin America who might want to meet a man from the U.S.?

Freedom of choice goes both ways.

Sunday June 21, 2009, 10:10 am
Yesterday Hannah Prager initiated another petition to calling for a new law that removes the so- called match.com exclusion.

Apparently Hannah is naive and fails to understand the hypocrisy IMBRA 2005 which created political exemptions for the largest dating sites potentially causing untold abuse and deaths of numerous women. Perhaps Hannah may not realize that IMBRA was originally introduced in 2003 and failed to get legislative support. In order to get the law passed the supporters of the law (a few politicians and the Tahirih Justice center) created political exemptions for large dating sites knowing their lobbyists (and money) would squash the bill. For years the IMBRA law failed to generate any legislative support so they "watered down" the law giving exemptions and a free pass to these sites so their customers wouldn't have to divulge criminal history.

In the final analysis the IMBRA law is all about political posturing and funding for special interest groups and a good reflection of the corrupt and unaccountable domestic violence industry.

The Tahirih Justice center was instrumental in getting IMBRA passed by lobbying for the law and then drafting a law which when passed (without any debate or testimony) had those exemptions in place.

Hannah since you've obviously not done your homework let me enlighten you with numerous women who used exempt dating sites whose male customers were given a “free pass” excluding them from criminal history disclosure.

Their flawed logic is depicted by the following tragic cases of abuse directed at women who used an exempt site:

(1) An American man is being held by police after his internet bride, who had been reported missing in Peru, turned up dead in a suitcase. http://www.livinginperu.com/news/4760

(2) A NY police officer was arrested for stalking and harassing a women he had met through an internet dating site.
http://abclocal.go.com/wabc/story?section=news/local&id=4050349

(3) A 23 year Maryland man was found guilty Thursday of first-degree murder in the death of a woman he met on MySpace.com
http://wjz.com/topstories/MySpace.murder.Internet.2.427262.html

(4) A 31 year old Massachusetts man was convicted of 2 counts of statutory rape of a 15 year old girl he met online via AOL messenhttp://www.lowellsun.com/ci_10223223

(5) A Philadelphia man was convicted of two counts of sexual assault for drugging women he met via Match.com
http://pysih.com/2007/06/14/jeffrey-j-marsalis/

(6) A man is charged with having sex with minor, whom he met via MySpace.com
http://www.nbc5.com/news/10205650/detail.html#

These are just a few examples of possibly hundreds of vicious murder, rape, torture and exploitation against women which may have been prevented if exempt dating sites (domestic and international) were forced to do criminal background checks on their male clients. Furthermore this doesn't include the 1100 American women residents who are murdered by their intimate partner every year. (Hannah & Romy please tell me what you are going to do about that problem. Don't bother to answer that question. The answer is nothing).

Perhaps even more disturbing is the fact that the Tahirih Justice Center vigorously defended these exemptions in a Federal court by intervening in the European Connections case in order to defend IMBRA regulations and force compliance on European Connections a small dating site whose membership represents 1% of American men who use match.com and Yahoo and other exempt sites to meet foreign women.

One can easily predict what will happen here. The Tahirih Justice with their enormous money and political connections will likely contact Care2 and possibly offer money to the owner or they may traffic their make believe lies and propaganda in order to prevent certain individuals from posting comments contrary to their views especially important since they recently received a $1.1 Million dollar grant to enforce the law which insures these exemptions and associated domestic violence will continue.

Something similar to this scenario happened back in 2006 shortly after IMBRA was passed. At that time a lot of disgruntled couples had their Fiancée Visas revoked because USCIS was not in compliance with IMBRA and lacked the necessary forms resulting in 10,000 fiancée Visas being revoked. During that time Visa Journey.com a website forum had an ongoing discussion from unhappy couples whose Fiancee Visas were blocked and most of the couples had net even met through the Internet.

In order to quell the unhappiness and complaints and the perception that IMBRA had caused the problem a lot of trolls that were aligned to the Tahirih Justice invaded the website and successfully managed to get the Visajourney.com to revoke posting privileges of individuals who had an opposite point of view from the Tahirih Justice Center. These trolls were allowed to continue posting their make believe lies and propaganda to defend the IMBRA law along with these exemptions. Did the Tahirih Justice Center give money to Visajourney.com and match.com? Did Tahirih Justice and their enforcement lawyers (Arnold and Porter) coerce the owner of Visajourney.com to comply with their wishes... or else.

While no one can prove these assertions we do know that Tahirih Justice recently received a $1.1 M earmark grant from wife beater/ abuser Congressman Moran whose moral hypocrisy knows no boundaries and who also recently received dirty funds from PMA group (whose offices were recently raided by the FBI). So we have a dirty Congressman who accepts money from dirty sources and provides questionable earmark funding to a money hungry organization (Tahirih Justice Center)so they can ride around in fancy cars and live the life of luxury while claming they represent the best interests of foreign women.

Good luck Romy,Hannah and others who think they are going to buck the system and get those exemptions removed that Tahirih worked so hard to protect with an ulterior motive which has nothing to do with protecting vulnerable foreign women. It's all about political posturing and money for groups like Tahirih Justice Center. Welcome to their world of deception where hidden agendas and big money count more than the truth.

Sunday June 21, 2009, 10:57 am
I think Brian is referring to this new petition:

http://humantrafficking.change.org/actions/view/remove_the_international_marriage_broker_regulation_act_matchcom_human_trafficking_exemption

Remove the International Marriage Broker Regulation Act "Match.com Human Trafficking Exemption"

_______________________________________________

It is actually addressed to the Tahirih Justice Center. Nothing like opening up the ol' email on Monday morning and finding dozens of screaming petitions. Gotta love it. Nice going Hannah. You just exposed Change.org (and Care2.com if someone dares to copy and paste it here like Tom did for the credit card petition) to the wrath of a very well connected and lucrative feminist organization. As Brian wrote, the TJC spent years of time and money to finally get their pet IMBRA passed (with those painfully necessary exemptions for Match.com and others). And they did not do it alone. The National Organization for Women, Gabriella, Polaris, The Protection Project, and a host of others joined the TJC with their guns-a-blazin heading into the halls of Congress. Despite it being Sunday, I am absolutely certain that all those groups are aware of Hannah's new mission.

The Match.com Murder case referred to in the new petition is a SMOKING CANNON! The TJC does NOT want this to be mainstream news. In addition to their complaining to Change.org, what are some other potential outcomes of this suddenly opened hangar of snakes?

.

Sunday June 21, 2009, 4:08 pm
The answer to the problem of abuse and exploitation is to hold people individually responsible for their actions, not to punish entire venues and handcuff every innocent single adult who is lonely for a companion.

Removing the Match.com exemption for foreign nationals doesn't solve the problem, it just creates another loophole; the fact that American women can date unsupervised on Match and other singles venues. What happens when a girl from Tennessee turns up murdered by her husband whom she met online? Regulate online dating across the board, whether the people come from foreign countries or not? And what about the myriad of other ways people can meet complete strangers online -- hobby forums, MySpace, Facebook, AgelessLove, Harry Potter forums, and the list goes on and on. Do we regulate all of these? How about newspaper and magazine personals columns? Regulate these as well? I wonder how many people who meet at bars and nightclubs end up abused, battered and murdered every year. Do we try to regulate this activity as well? How? Where does it end?

I wonder where all you people stand on the prosecution and punishment of people who DO commit acts of domestic violence. Are you for harsh penalties? Would you lock up a spouse batterer and KEEP him/her behind bars? Would you be for the death penalty for someone who kills his/her spouse? You want to punish innocent people, but you don't seem to want to punish the guilty. Time after time these sick monsters get off scott free for their heinous crimes, and who pays? The rest of us who simply want to meet a woman (or man) of culture who happens to be from the Philippines or other country. Our "crime" is being "unrealistic" in our expectations or wanting a "traditional wife"... whatever that means... when we haven't committed a single crime or act of violence in our lives.

Monday June 22, 2009, 10:25 am
Hmmm, I posted my last comment on Friday night. Since then I have had ELEVEN responses. Funny that they are all from Brian, Tom, Bob and Jon, who want to rant and rave. I suppose I could waste a lot of time arguing with the four of you til kingdom come and we are not going to change each other's minds. And that's okay, because we can agree to disagree. So I'm done. There are other petitions to sign and more action to take that will make more of a difference that sitting here arguing with the four of you.

Am I backing down? Absolutely not. I stand by my decision to sign the petition, and that is not going to change. But unlike the four of you, I have a life outside of this forum. I also have a job, a family, a grandbaby, and hobbies other than arguing with strangers on care2.com. And I'm sure not going to spend my day responding to 11 emails. Sorry guys but I'm busy. I noticed that none of your wives or girlfriends bothered to respond to this post. Maybe they're busy scrubbing your shoes, or maybe they're not allowed to use the computer. Who knows.

I am so grateful that the Diner's Club stepped down from financing the purchase of women from other countries. Some of your arguments make sense, but most of them are propaganda from Tristan's web site. My other concern is that any post from me will encourage you to vomit more of your propaganda, since I don't have time on my hands like you four do. Please note that while four of your are against this petition, hundreds of people signed it. So good luck to the four of you, wish you all well.

Monday June 22, 2009, 11:48 am

You mean hundreds of people used the petition form to tell Mastercard to ignore this petition nonsense.

Change needs to be honest about what constitutes "Signing"

Plus, to show the mentality of people who sign just any old petition that sounds right, dozens have also signed the hoax petition that asks for IMBRA to be expanded to include Match (if that were to happen Match would pay for the lawsuit to finally overturn the whole thing).

Plus, you need to know that Diner's Club stopped working with a Singapore criminal who wasn't in the dating business.

And, no, one can't agree to disagree with someone who deliberately states facts wrong. You can mind your own business instead of my girlfriend's business however.

I speak her language in her country. Until you speak Russian Romy, don't be calling her stupid for not being able to write a good argument in English against insane US lawmaking and sad cultural quirks like the one that makes older US women want to block their countrymen from dating younger women.

1) What do you think of Mastercard serving all the German brothels filled with Polish women? Do you want me to list more of them with their websites and phone numbers so you can get a man to ask if they take Visa, Mastercard? if something is legal, credit card companies are there.

2) Why didn't you ever note what I said about the worst part of the IMBRA law not being the honor system background checks that men write themselves (results are given freely by men - you can bet how accurate that will be) but the clause that requires electronic signatures from foreigners who don't have Blackberries?

If an American is in Moscow for the weekend and wants to meet someone who can only read her email at work on Monday, IMBRA must not be allowed to block contact until Monday because of the need to get her signature. She must be allowed to sign a general waiver that she doesn't want the protection of the US government against its own citizens.

IMBRA takes away the right of foreign women to decide their own level of security in dating men.

And do you think foreign women will thank you for all this -- for shutting dating sites down? Your petition wants the women to be told "Sorry - no American guys for you."

It is also clear that lots of people apparently sign things without reading comments. That isn't good practice in business and/or activism.

To the hoaxster Hannah Prager: you should have written that other petition to the US AG and also told the AG to fish or cut bait on IMBRA because Cherry Blossoms refuses to identify their site as a marriage broker, making the law toothless despite the fraudulent $1M per year that Tahirih has collected for 2 years to NOT enforce the law.

Monday June 22, 2009, 12:07 pm
Also Romy:

Couples stand ready in all US regions to publicly debate people like you. Montel Williams and Tyra Banks were already humiliated by foreign brides who protested attempts to make them look stupid for marrying an American man. And no real man is going to accept having a US woman say "You've lost your privilege of free association because some men misbehaved".

So does any pro-petition person want to put their money where their mouth is in a public debate before the audience of your choosing (women's studies class would be ideal)?

Does anyone want a foreign woman to publicly shame them by telling them where they can put their desire to "help" them not meet a nice guy?

Soon the men's rights movement will have their own TV channel where the foreign women WILL appear to make THEIR case as opposed to the case of the jealous middle aged US "rvials".

There is a brand new Twitter account called @ForeignBride I recommend to you.

Nonsense like this petition only convinces more men NOT to agree to disagree. It is outrageous that anyone could read these arguments and not say the 6 dissenters make a good point.

Even the Tahirih Justice Center agrees IMBRA needs to be rewritten.

Monday June 22, 2009, 12:21 pm
Also consider this.

According to the latest census data, the U.S. population is at about 300 million and the world population stands at about 6 billion. That means 95% of the world's population, and hence 95% of the world's WOMEN, live outside the U.S. If you're so interested in women's rights, then why are you for laws and regulations that limit the dating and marriage choices of 95% of the world's female population?

Monday June 22, 2009, 2:28 pm
noted & signer #119

Monday June 22, 2009, 6:41 pm
Despite the assertion Romy made claiming that Jon, Bob, Tom and others on the board (with an opposite point of view) were ranting and raving there is no malice on our part. I believe that Romy's factual information on the subject of international matchmaking has been twisted by special interest groups such as the Tahirih Justice Center who rely on base supporters such as Romy to spread their hysterical campaign of misinformation. Romy gets nothing for her efforts while the Tahirih Justice Center makes untold millions.

There is no scientific evidence to prove that couples who met through the internet are any more prone to wife abuse than those who met through other means. Therefore there is no justification to restrict the communication and basic rights to date and marry a person of our choosing. You simply cannot take the rights of a certain defined group of people (American men who date foreign women) and make false hysterical claims that they are dangerous and their rights should be taken away.

Obviously we won't change Romy's mind on this particular topic but the opinions of thousands who read these messages may want to consider the misinformation campaign. American men who date foreign women are merely involved in the legitimate task of writing a letter to make contact (e mail, fax or phone) with someone from a different culture. Can someone please tell how or why this constitutes trafficking?

Trafficking of women is a horrific violation of any established law or human rights. It’s really a pity that men like Jack, Bob, Tom, Tristan, Jon and myself are painted with a broad brush of negativity just because we’ve proven there is no correlation between international dating sites and trafficking or selling of women. Of course Trafficking is a subject which is bound to elicit heated emotions and the Tahirih Justice Center, Polaris Project, Civil Society and others(Romy or Hannah?) know this. I guess what I am trying to say is that when people get fired up there's a tendency for a mob mentality to form and in this rush to judgment innocent groups or individuals who aren't involved get blamed and punished without even one shred of evidence. This is precisely why Hannah Prager’s petition is a fraud (my opinion).

In the final analysis it's all about money, power and political posturing. The Tahirih Justice Center is a non profit organization who was instrumental in getting IMBRA 2005 (an Internet dating law) passed by getting politicians and their base supporters fired up to do something about their manufactured problem of exploitation of foreign women. The Tahirih Justice Center has been quoted numerous times on national media suggesting American men who date foreign women could purchase their bride and/ or…. “many are premeditated torturers”. They never have supplied any evidence there is a problem specifically with couples who met through an International dating site.

Tahirih Justice Center claims to represent large numbers of foreign women but they actually represent a few women many who may be green card scammers while a few of their executives rake in handsome salaries. Tahirih’s meteoric rise in net assets reveals a ten fold increase in 7 years, a troubling statistic worthy of special mention and typical of the unaccountable domestic violence industry that Romy and other base supporters need to think about before they waste more of their time cheerleading for special interest groups.

Monday June 22, 2009, 6:52 pm
I am sorry, Romy. I misread your post and thought you were done on Friday. But appreciate your attempt at closure today. While you are in signing mode, don't forget this one:

http://humantrafficking.change.org/actions/view/remove_the_international_marriage_broker_regulation_act_matchcom_human_trafficking_exemption

Seems to be right up your alley; in fact, I recognize some of your catch phrases in the intro paragraphs. Guess you could not resist.

Propaganda. Really? Without an agenda, there is no need for propaganda. There is no agenda because nothing has changed and nothing will as long as 95% of Earth's women live outside the United States.

TaTa

Tuesday June 23, 2009, 5:44 am
I think this debate has run its course.

I would jut like to say in closing that you cannot paint all men who date or marry women outside of the U.S. as traffickers simply because you find their tastes and dating habits repugnant. You can have whatever opinion of us you wish, but please try to be honest and accurate in your reporting.

Paying a fee to have a letter forwarded or a message posted is not the same as paying a fee to have someone presented to you for marriage. You simply do not understand the law or the definition of trafficking. No one is purchasing, luring or coercing anyone to come here. If a marriage is "arranged" it is solely up to the two willing and consenting adults who choose to be with each other. There are a million ways people from all over the world can meet each other, so shutting down one venue accomplishes nothing. You cannot stop people from crossing international borders to meet and fall in love.

You talk about propaganda. What exactly is Tristan's "propaganda"? How about this for propaganda: "marriage broker", "buying a bride", "consumer-husband", "trafficking in brides", "exploiting women in 'developing' countries", etc. Does any of this sound just a liiiiiiitle like propaganda to anyone else but me?

I would say this to Romy. If you had a lonely single son in his mid 30's who wasn't getting dates, you might feel differently about international dating.

Tuesday June 23, 2009, 6:16 am

Gladly signed. Thanks for posting this, Tom!

Tuesday June 23, 2009, 5:31 pm
So Carole,

Why do you hate your son? Why do you want him to compete in a solely American dating market where men are judged by six-pack abs, baby faces, football player shoulders and bank accounts? Why don't you want to give him the option to seek companionship outside of a very narrow sphere of influence? Why do you want to force him to date in a culture where men are "old" at 30?

Do you really think that placing and answering personal ads in dating columns is trafficking? Do you really believe that consenting adults can traffic themselves?

Tuesday June 23, 2009, 5:59 pm

Ummm, Rob? I don't have a son. But, if I did, I'd prefer that he maintain a strong identify based on his own attributes -- not with a idealized version of "perfection" that no one can achieve. Few men can live up to that stereotype . . . but I don't know any women of any substance who even expect that.

But, that said, I will also say that I have known men who ONLY look at ads placed by women in third world countries. The majority of these men have low self-esteem, a history of being incapable of sustaining a meaningful relationship, and feel inadequate with women of equal financial status and intelligence who can consider many other choices of partners.

Your questions, and assumptions, have already said quite a bit about your disappointments, presumptions and negative self-image. What "man" would reach the age of 30+ and still be in a situation where his mother would [your words] "force him to date in a culture..." (ANY culture)????

You are making a firm case for your opposition, so I'd advise you to go back to your computer, turn on your camera, and keep searching for someone who would pretend to buy that line, as long as you consensually agree to buy her a ticket.

Tuesday June 23, 2009, 7:37 pm
I never said that anybody's mother forces anybody to do anything. You completely misread my words. You people seem to read what you want to read and disregard the rest.

I did say that you, by your ridiculous petition, want to force men to LIMIT their dating choices to a culture where their options are more limited. I believe the standards of success and desirability are more shallow in this culture, but that's just my opinion. You have yours.

If you had a son, the success of this petition that you signed would impact him. That's all I meant by what I said.

You can be repulsed by men placing and answering ads in columns where "third world" women advertise if you want. That is your right. But I would hope you would commit to some standard of honesty and integrity. Paying a fee to post a message on a message board, or answer someone else's message, is not trafficking. No one has explained to me how consenting adults mutually agreeing to communicate with each other, and later explore marriage possibilities, constitutes trafficking.

People should be free to make whatever dating or marriage choice they want to make, right or wrong. We don't live in a Nurse Ratchet nanny state... yet! No one is taking away YOUR freedom to seek whom YOU desire to be with.

Tuesday June 23, 2009, 8:01 pm

Rob, let's get something straight here. If anyone is putting words in anyone's mouth, it's YOU! Your first comment to me: "Why do you hate your son? Why do you want him to compete in a solely American dating market where men are judged by six-pack abs, baby faces, football player shoulders and bank accounts? Why don't you want to give him the option to seek companionship outside of a very narrow sphere of influence? Why do you want to force him to date in a culture where men are "old" at 30?

Do you really think that placing and answering personal ads in dating columns is trafficking? Do you really believe that consenting adults can traffic themselves?"

was in response to ONE SHORT COMMENT I made: "Gladly signed. Thanks for posting this, Tom!"

Frankly, I couldn't care less what you do (and you, obviously, don't think any other women in this country do either).

Best of luck with your "mutually agreeing to communicate with each other, and later explore marriage possibilities."

Sheesh! Uptight much?

Tuesday June 23, 2009, 9:10 pm
So Carole, here is ONE SHORT QUESTION

Why did you sign the petition?

Tuesday June 23, 2009, 9:49 pm

I signed this petition (pretending here that it is any of your business) because I happen to be a human rights activist. As such, I have knowledge of the prevalence of human trafficking in certain countries.

While you may very well be an upstanding, honest person, you must be aware that making women, most of whom are in unfortunate circumstances, easily accessible, is also putting many of them at high risk for a variety of unsavory experiences.

As you seem to be sensitive to your rights, I would hope that you could also be aware enough to see how this could also lead to a violation of theirs. The petition is NOT asking for the sites to be banned, as you have insinuated, it is simply putting pressure on major credit card companies to take some public responsibility for what their credit cards purchase.

Any time women (and I've noticed that men, for some reason, are not mentioned as possible partners), are presented as "objects," almost in the same vein as a mail-order catalogue -- and quite honestly, are described as if they are more desirable because they think differently simply because they are from another country -- a red flag immediately goes up for most people alert to the possibility of abuse.

That is all I intend to say about the subject. I have found your demeanor to be quite rude, self-centered and inconsiderate and hardly feel that I need to justify to you, or anyone, my motives for signing a petition which may cast light on a potential human rights violation.

Also, for the record, I have not seen you; have no idea how old you are; how much you weigh, whether you have any money, etc., but from this brief dialogue, there is no way I'd be interested in even speaking to you again.

Tuesday June 23, 2009, 10:08 pm
Interesting. So the concern is about making women accessible. I also thought it was about cutting off access (like a romantic Iron Curtain) but you are the first to state it. Of course, these women you speak of cannot be making themselves accessible. Its the website and how they found that medium and got there photo on it is a mystery. But if the medium did not exist, would they then find a way to voluntarily make themselves accessible by some other method? And if they did, would that other venue then be demonized and heckled out of business? Maybe for ONCE, someone from the "activist" community would put down there access to online petitions and go out and ASK foreign women how they feel about their pursuit of American men AND how they feel about "activists" second guessing there ability to think for themselves. If you did, then you would probably feel silly and apologize and nobody really likes doing that.

Tuesday June 23, 2009, 10:25 pm
Carole,

It is every woman and man's business why you or anyone would sign an insane petition to wreck other people's free association. We will work to disbarr lawyers who blatenly ignore "Right to Assemble".

You better hope the petition goes nowhere because men haven’t even begun to fight (IMBRA is simply ignored).

Do you really want all-out war in the courts? Do you think Sotomajor will be on your side?

More on that below.

Carole just, between the lines, explained why she signed a petition to totally destroy businesses that might help men her age to ignore her (credit cards make or break businesses):

1) She’s maybe concerned that men her age in the USA are ignoring her because they “feel inadequate” about dating women of equal financial status. Here she is not only talking about the men she would reject but the doctors and lawyers and alpha male businessmen who aren’t calling. What she isn’t admitting here is the truth that most men prefer a 10+ year age difference and alpha males prefer a 20-30 year age difference.
2) She maybe desperately wants to believe, like Romy, that only socially inept lonely males are going to Russia, which is NOT a third world country. There are now enough rich Russian men that even the poorest peasant girl has the option of going to Moscow and throwing herself at the feet of rich Russian men…as if Russian woman aren’t the proudest women on Earth. They don’t thrown themselves at the feet of any man.
3) She doesn’t want to understand that it isn’t the poverty of a country that makes women pro-American. Russia and the Philippines have cultures that value world travel and value a thread to American culture, + Russia has the highest education levels in the world.

Carole is correct that we have ALL seen some socially inept men make a go of dating overseas (and many get taken by scammers).

But what Carole is NOT saying is that she’s seen desirable alpha males totally ignore her and/or she fears her partner needs to be conditioned (shamed) into never considering how young and beautiful a woman he could get if the options remain open.

This really is all about blocking access of the alpha males (including doctors, lawyers) to much younger and highly educated women

Now Carole, a number of lawyers are going to be disbarred for their behavior in such matters. If you are a lawyer, don’t call yourself an “activist”

If you are profiting from the Domestic Violence Industry or receiving federal funds in anyway for writing here, it is very much our business that you came here.

And what are you going to do about Mastercard serving German brothels Carole? Are you an “activist” there as well?

Or is it that you don’t mind women renting themselves via credit cards?

After WW2 it was very much “the business” of others to find out who got the Nuernberg Laws enacted.

The Nuernberg Laws made it a crime for German men to date Russian women.

Wednesday June 24, 2009, 4:43 am
Jack makes a good point. Many of the women who advertise in these columns are highly educated, intelligent, and have many dating options both in their own countries and around the world. Also, the standard of living is rising in both the Philippines and Russia, as well as in many other countries. Many people in the Philippines, including children, carry cell phones, Blackberries and have their own laptop computers. Russia, as Jack pointed out, is no longer considered a third world country. So I think the claim that these women are "desperate" to "escape poverty" and therefore "advertise" for American men is an oversimplified and overused stereotype.

Yet Carol has just insulted 95% of the world's women with her arrogant assertion that "The majority of these men have low self-esteem, a history of being incapable of sustaining a meaningful relationship, and feel inadequate with women of equal financial status and intelligence who can consider many other choices of partners." She evidently thinks that women from Russia and the Philippines, many of whom have Master's degrees, are not of "equal intelligence" nor can "consider many other choices of partners". What an insult to the women!

Wednesday June 24, 2009, 5:55 am

"The majority of these men have low self-esteem"

The opposite is true. The majority are alpha males with the highest self-esteem.

" a history of being incapable of sustaining a meaningful relationship,"

The kind of guy who left a relationship with someone his own age like her and now dates younger American women as well as foreigners but stilll cannot commit...I am guilty of that.

"and feel inadequate with women of equal financial status and intelligence who can consider many other choices of partners."

Actually I wish my 23 year old girlfriend was finished with college and earning money on her own. I won't marry her until she can do that...but nothing wrong with making babies either.

Carole's horrifyingly racist slam at the intelligence of foreign women would produce the following reaction that has become a classic on Youtube where 2 foreign women are told how people like Carole think:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihW4P8Bcrxc


As I said above, the likes of Carole and Romy are fighting a War Against Confident Men Dating Younger Women. The motive is to try to lesson the chances of being abandoned or ignored in their own lives. This war has several fronts:

1) Make sure US culture heavily frowns on young adult women dating men 30+. The problem is that alpha males over 40 expect to date women in their early 20s. This cultural conflict already existed in the 1920s when F Scott Fitzgerald wrote “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” That story, as opposed to the film, discussed this issue critically.
2) Stopping avenues of workplace dating involving age-difference by saying female employees are “vulnerable” even if not in the direct line of management
3) Stopping avenues of higher education dating involving age-difference by saying even adult students not in a professor’s classes are “vulnerable”
4) Stopping avenues of dealing with other cultures where women may not have gotten the memo in 1 above

The official NOW reaction to the Letterman joke last week was to say that it was terrible to provide “imagery of a 30+ baseball player with an 18 year old”. I am not kidding. The NOW press release says exactly that…revealing why the NOW really exists.

I always predicted that these Baby Boomers would escalate the war by going after credit card companies.

But what they don’t realize is that these dating sites will finally fight back when they are finally provoked (IMBRA actually helps their business if they pretend to comply)

Once someone seriously fights back (European Connections wasn’t being serious) it might mean that this petition can finally get IMBRA and maybe VAWA revoked.

Best to let sleeping dogs lie. A Mastercard coup would be like 9-11 to men.

At least Carole and Romy should ask MasterCard to stop serving the Bunny Ranch in Nevada + German and Dutch brothels first.

Wednesday June 24, 2009, 6:56 am
 
Hmmm . . .  My apologies for not reading your articles noted until now, Tom.  It led me to some research of my own.
 
"Sexy Ukrainian Women Looking for Love": The Fight Against Sex Tourism
Ukrainian feminists are trying to curb a growing sex tourism industry that exploits women and children.
 
 
"After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1993, Russian mail-order brides became a distressing cliché, but as Russia grew wealthy its women were less reliant on foreign husbands. So foreigners looking for an easy marriage turned to Russia’s neighbor, Ukraine. Traveling there was once a lengthy process involving embassies and visa fees, but in 2005 the nation dropped visa requirements for citizens of the European Union and the United States. Consequently, more than 20 million people visit Ukraine each year, and the capital, Kiev, is now a popular tourist destination.
 
Unfortunately, one of Kiev’s main tourist attractions seems to be women. When the visa laws changed, Ukraine, once just a notorious source of sex-trafficked women, now became a sex-industry destination as well, a gateway from East to West. Explained one sex worker, prostituted Ukrainian women who had worked in other Eastern bloc countries such as the Czech Republic and Poland then came home. Child pornography also grew more prevalent, since it was now easy to enter this relatively poor country and exploit underage victims, especially homeless children and orphans."
 
Manila Times Internet Edition
"Criminals tweak their noses at law-abiding citizens. We have been badly damaged abroad by operators of mail-order brides, incompetent doctors and nurses, sex symbols and dirty politicians.
 
We need to dispel impressions of people in other countries that they can buy a Filipina bride in the same manner that they order “pizza-to-go.” Filipinas are not for sale, we tell the world. But if the underground mail-order bride business is thriving, our denials are useless."
 
My genuine thanks to you, Tom, for this information and all of your other good work; I will be actively promoting this petition at other sites, through personal email contacts and by blogging.
 
 
 

Wednesday June 24, 2009, 8:09 am
Is the phrase Alpha Male not just used by men with low self-esteem then ?

Wednesday June 24, 2009, 8:43 am
Actually, the Philippines has benefited greatly from the foreign husbands of Philippine women who buy PROPERTY, not WIVES in the Philippines. Many of these men later retire in the Philippines to live out their lives with the women they've spent their lives with. It doesn't sound like "pizza-to-go" to me.

The notion that anybody "buys" a bride is proliferated by ignorant people who confuse the figurative language of jealous women who think foreigners are marrying men "for money and citizenship" only. If this were true, then why do so many of them end up back in their native countries WITH their husbands? The burden of proof that their marriages are not genuine is on Carole and her ignorant cohorts.

I will agree with the Manila reporter that the IMAGE of people buying brides needs to go. People need to learn the truth that adults have the right to communicate with whom they choose, and that email correspondence that leads to people falling in love is not a form of buying, selling or trafficking anyone.

To classify it as such is to bring the iron fist of tyrannical governments down on innocent law-abiding people. The government is not your mother, it has no right to tell you whom you're allowed and not allowed to date. If you're obeying all other laws, then to tell you you can't date that women because she comes from the Philippines is an obscene infringement on individual rights.

You feminists have a weird concept of "choice". You think a woman's "choice" to kill her unborn baby is a God-given right that should be protected by the constitution, but that a man shouldn't have the "choice" to date or marry whom he chooses. What flaming hypocrites!

Wednesday June 24, 2009, 10:43 am
Signed, #125.

Wednesday June 24, 2009, 11:18 am
Well that was an insightful comment. You mean 125 minus 50 or so dissenters who had to "sign" in order to send a dissenting letter.

Rosie: Are you trying to say that men with high self-esteem date their own age? Novel concept. Life doesn't work that way however. The real losers are guys like Elliot Spitzer who sign laws against being a john in order to placate an activist wife and then hire a hooker anyway. Guys who think about marriage generally have higher esteem than the guys who buy into the USsex industry which is the largest per capita in the world.



Carole:

We completely agree with each other now.

The IMAGE of men buying women has to be defeated.

However, something tells me that you want to PROMOTE that image. Am I right?

I am glad you admitted that you hadn’t researched this topic before your last post. That means smart people can disregard your previous posts.

I am also glad you admitted that Russia is now a 1st world country. Too bad you don’t understand that the Ukraine is not far behind.

You’re operating on old news. This dating industry, like newspapers, is collapsing before the social networking industry.

After Facebook etc got big after 2004 – there are fewer and fewer young women on these dating sites.

In the Ukraine, only the upper middle class will date US males. The lower classes have been traumatized into being frightened of foreign males because of all the TV shows about women being kidnapped and sold into sex slavery in Turkey.

This is exaggerated as I have been all over Turkey and was never offered a sex slave nor did I see an attractive Ukrainian prostitute except in Istanbul where they have cell phones and $2000 per month apartments of their own.

But the image of foreign males is still bad in the Ukraine as a result of that propaganda.

As for the sex industry (completely different from marriage agencies) – the USA leads as the sex tourism capital of the world and there are more Ukrainian prostitutes inside the USA than in the Ukraine itself (they work at strip clubs that donate to the Democratic Party and I can name names but feminists show no interest when I say that because they don’t mind women renting themselves).

Why does Carole not care about Mastercard serving the German brothels that employ so many EU Polish women?

In Kiev itself, Mastercard serves the restaurant River Palace where prostitutes hang out – but regular and married women go there with their friends as well. Do you want to protest to Mastercard about that one restaurant where some prostitution takes place and where some foreigners show up now and then?

It only seems that more women are available on dating sites from the Ukraine because many of those sites are Scam sites including the ones that feed into the big US agencies. By scamming I mean that the women are not really available.

As for “children”…why bring up this dishonest topic that has nothing to do with any of these dating sites? Why did Romy directly say she thinks women are posing in their sexy swimwear as if their children are in the same picture and also posing in sexy swimwear? That kind of talk is a mentally sick accusation and I have to ask rational people to stop it. At worst, this refers possibly to the fact that nobody knew in the 1990s whether 18 or 17 or the age of consent should be the limit for dating sites and some dating sites, including a lot of German and French sites that still follow this policy today, used to think 17 was OK. We Americans hold at 18 but the hell men are going to put up with radical baby boomer women trying to raise the age of consent to 21 in the US. The Protect Act says US males can be arrested for having sex with anyone under 16 overseas. I have had taxi drivers all over the world offer me everything but no taxi driver in any country ever tried to sell a minor or a child. Men would report this if they saw it.

Anyway Carole: I hope you allow other points of view in your blog comments. Somehow I doubt that.

Wednesday June 24, 2009, 11:39 am
Let’s remember as well that the women of the Slavic world are mostly not so quick to have sex as western women are.

Ukrainian women are among the most chaste in the world and they will often be virgins until marriage at age 25.

So it wasn’t really an issue if some guy had a date sometime in the 90s with someone who was 17.75 years old because he would have been held off on sex for quite a ways into the relationship, which means above 18.

It is a huge slander for feminists to imply that Ukrainian women are loose with foreign men as even many of the scammers avoid casual sex. I noted above that the lower classes don’t date foreign men.

A lot of Filipinas are strict Catholics.

Wednesday June 24, 2009, 11:08 pm
No I'm not saying that men with High Self-Esteem date women their own age, see my earlier comment regarding my husband (34 years older than me). He has very High Self-Esteem. It was the phrase Alpha Male that made me smile...I never thought anyone used that !

Saturday June 27, 2009, 1:01 pm
Romy Carver wrote above on June 22, 2009: "But unlike the four of you, I have a life outside of this forum. I also have a job, a family, a grandbaby, and hobbies other than arguing with strangers on care2.com."

"I noticed that none of your wives or girlfriends bothered to respond to this post. Maybe they're busy scrubbing your shoes, or maybe they're not allowed to use the computer. Who knows."

"My other concern is that any post from me will encourage you to vomit more of your propaganda, since I don't have time on my hands like you four do."

This is a hateful and insulting posting and it is completely disrespectful of people with opinions other than Ms. Carver's. One lesson I have learned in my 50+ years of life is that people resort to hitting below the belt when they are losing an argument but are emotionally unable to admit it.

BTW, Ms. Carver, if you were to repeat that comment about not being able to use the computer to my wife's face, my wife being the IT manager of our company's computers, she would laugh at you. And the reason she doesn't post in places like this is that she says people like you who patronize women like her make her sick and are not worth bothering with.

Saturday June 27, 2009, 1:31 pm
Sorry for this additional post but I want to answer those who wonder why people take up causes like this one and not others in Europe or elsewhere.

It's easy. One can sit in her comfortable living room chair and fire off emails, create petitions on change.org and feel like she is doing something useful and productive. No need to travel, no need to meet the couples or men they are bashing (hmmm, could they be the socially maladjusted ones who are pointing that finger at us who are world travelers who meet and marry people from other countries, have inlaws from other cultures and sometimes children from other cultures?)

Also, no need to learn another language, and this is a biggie. Because if these people were fluent in other languages, they COULD, say, attack the Polish prostitution issue in Germany on German-language forums. But acquiring a fluency in another language is very hard work. Maybe too hard for people who like to sit in their comfy chairs and tap away at keyboards attacking others (who do speak other tongues). I speak three languages, my wife speaks two. I wonder how many of the petition signers are monolingual v. those they are attacking. I also wonder what the educational level is of the petition signers v. those they are attacking. US government statistics (that darned Scholes study again) report that those who go abroad to find wives have higher educational levels than those who marry American women. No stats exist on the foreign wives, but mine has an advanced degree in engineering.

Sunday June 28, 2009, 2:39 pm

167 signatures so far!

(and just gettin' started!)

Sunday June 28, 2009, 4:25 pm
Carole - in response to your post from here

http://www.care2.com/c2c/share/detail/1179521

Note the following comments regarding what you wrote in quotes:

"...we got the International Marriage Broker Regulation Act (IMBRA) to help protect women who use IMBs from becoming trapped in trafficking..."

The word "trafficking" is suddenly blowing in the wind, everywhere. Its the new buzzword. It even trumps the all-inclusive, one-size-fits-all "misogyny"

"...her husband may feel like he owns her since he paid for her..."

Um, maybe someone could actually ask one of these husbands how he feels. But of course its easier to just make assumptions and accusations while ramming bon bons down your throat when typing angry remarks.

"IMBRA doesn't regulate even-playing-field services like Match.com, because IMBs' profit model and marketing practices uniquely place women at greater risk for abuse."

Somehow, Match.com forgot to maintain its field and uniquely enabled an American with a criminal history to access and kill a Peruvian woman in 2007. Someone should fire these feminists coaches and referees for their complete incompetence on the field.

"IMBs...objectify and degrade women as a whole."

Well, there you have it. She is upset. And that about sums it up folks.

.

Monday June 29, 2009, 3:45 am

What Carole makes reference to is a bizarre experiment by Match.com to force people (in this case mostly US women) to pay $25 even if they are only answering an email instead of initiating contact…which is what the male usually does in human nature.

This is what Carole means by “even playing field” but what it really is is a sad attempt by older women to discourage budget-minded American college coeds from competing with them for the interest of older guys with careers and the means to pay $25 per month. Carole wants US law to benefit cougars with money, making it more possible for money to buy an older woman some attention + give the older woman an “even playing field”.

So what happens is that a 35 year old male will try to write a 23 year old American woman on Match.com and never get an answer. She may have liked him and wanted to answer him but not enough to pay $25.

He would then be hurt and attempt to contact his second choice, say a 28 year old woman who has decided to pay $25 because her chances are (relatively) dwindling compared to the 23 year old (biological clock ticking or whatever you want to call it).

In the end, the men who put up with this social engineering nonsense often end up married to their second or third choices.

But the older women can feel more comfortable on Match.com knowing that not only are the gorgeous young “freeloaders” told to take a hike (in the interest of the older women and NOT the older men) but Match.com actually totally bans all Russian and Ukrainian women from competing at all whether they ware willing to pay $25 or not.

Smart men don’t use dating sites where the receiver of an initiator’s email has to pay to respond.

Let’s look at the Constitutionality of all this because Carole has, by her silence, openly admitted that she would be OK with at least a water-down version of the 1935 Nuernberg Laws that made it illegal for German men to date Russian women.

In New York City, ironically, a male activist challenged Ladies Night last year at Manhattan clubs. He lost at the district level because the judge said that it was unconstitutional for the government at state or federal level to interfere with commerce by telling businesses that they cannot encourage female participation in parties by charging them less money than men.

Of course businesses can encourage women to join social venues and not only by making it free for them, but by BRIBING the women with free drinks or free salad bar.

Thus Ladies Nights in the USA are the EXACT equivalent of Foreign Affair Tours where 200 foreign women arrive for free food and champagne when only 20 men are there and paid $300 each to be there.

The Ladies Nights court challenge, ironically made by a socalled men’s rights activist, will help seal the deal that “Marriage Brokers” have every right not to be persecuted or regulated simply because they make the service free for women.

So there is zero legal support for the radical feminist concept of “Level Playing Field”.

Having said that, the IMBs can easily declare themselves to NOT be IMBs under IMBRA by simply stating that the women on the site may purchase the ability to send a letter to a man at the same price structure.

They just need to have a button that says to foreign women “Click here to buy a $3000 tour to the USA to meet hundreds of exciting US men”.

The funny thing is, not only would having such a button cause a site to no longer be considered an IMB under IMBRA, some rich Russian women would actually go for it, especially these days.

The reason why the IMBs will NOT do this is because many WANT to use IMBRA as an excuse to force men to pay more money and spend more time NOT directly contacting anyone.

While they won’t comply with IMBRA where it gets in their way, don’t be under the impression that the IMBs are trying in any way to stop IMBRA. They only sued it in court for a few weeks before they realized that the law didn’t hurt them but only their customers…and who cares about the customers.

However, if Carole is successful against a fair sized US-owned dating site (getting Mastercard to stop working with them), that is when those businesses declare war in the courts.

So be careful of what you ask for.

I wouldn’t mind seeing the IMBs finally squirm and finally informing their 1,500,000+ men on their mailing lists that IMBRA even exists.