Funny T-Shirts

likes the outdoors, more the open air of the beach or the desert than the woods. She would love to live somewhere away from it all. She is bright and funny and full of life and while she has little direct experience with the opposite sex we have made sure she is aware of everything she needs to know to be a good wife and mother.

Everything looked questionably legit at first, until I read the testimonials. It has to be hoax.

"Our 15 year old daughter . . . did nothing but mope around the house bringing everybody down, so we decided to marry her off through your site. Now our house is a lot cheerier and we love our new swimming pool and Jaccuzi!"

Every testimonial is equally outrageous - it has to be a hoax.

I went to this site and, agreed, the testimonials were outrageous. But I did take the time to email the PR man with a legitimate email asking for info and included my snailmail address (a PO Box, mind you). I'll post any developments as far as that goes.

Arranging marriages isn't against the law, it's just not commonly done. So it would be weird for law enforcement to use something that is legal as a front to target any illegal behavior.

I found the site yesterday, and spent about 10 minutes opening and closing my mouth in confusion and horror... tooled around the site for a bit and came up with the conclusion: Hoax.

It looks fairly real, until you get to the testimonials page, in which 14 yr olds talk about their new husband being "ok" and proud that their parents could buy a new car and parents saying that they finally married off their rebel 15 yr old and got a jacuzzi out of the deal and couldn't be happier.

That added in with the profiles themselves, many talking about "everything she needs to know to be a wife"... because, well, if I wanted to creep people out I would use clean language to insinuate my 14 yr old daughter is totally ready to start having sex with some old man who purchased her and start makin' babbies. In fact, you can submit your daughter with a profile, so I did. "Jezebel" was 13 and going for a mere $7,995 because as a godly parent I understood her husband was going to have to teach her A LOT about being a good wife, and therefore would get a price break. No response from the website yet. No requests for money (the %5 down of "bride price" they request upfront) or ways to upload her photo.

Hoax.

BRILLIANT one. Loved it.

When I first saw the website my impression was what the hell. The keywords make you wonder just who they are marketing to.

there was a news article saying the following:

"Contacted through MarryOurDaughter this morning, Mr. Ordover quickly conceded the page was a parody aimed at drawing attention to inconsistencies in state marriage laws. States consider it a crime for adults to have sex with minors, but they allow kids as young as 12 to get married with parental and sometime judicial permission."

Basically he was trying to stir up anger in people to get laws changed. Which has worked BRILLIANT!!!

The rest of the original artical read:

The site is a prank. Thank goodness.
But not everyone is in on the joke. The site has gotten 20 million page views in the last two weeks and now elicits around a thousand, mostly angry, emails a day. In the last few days, the site’s “publicity director” has also appeared on at least half a dozen talk radio shows around the country, including on Las Vegas (MIX-FM), Houston (KRBE-FM) and Philadelphia (WYSP-FM) and mixed it up with belligerent on-air-personalities and hostile listeners, whom he neglected to let in on the ruse.
“People get angry so fast they don’t stop to question whether its real,” says the creator of MarryOurDaughter.com, John Ordover, who masqueraded as the site’s fictional publicity director, the unlikely surnamed Roger Mandervan.
Mr. Ordover is a science-fiction editor with a prankish history and an interest in urban nudism.
Contacted through MarryOurDaughter this morning, Mr. Ordover quickly conceded the page was a parody aimed at drawing attention to inconsistencies in state marriage laws. States consider it a crime for adults to have sex with minors, but they allow kids as young as 12 to get married with parental and sometime judicial permission.
“As far as I can tell, in every state but Oregon, parents can marry off their children,” Mr. Ordover said, pointing to this Cornell University Web site which tracks the various state marriage laws. Texas has a particularly ridiculous legal discrepancy, he says. Kids as young as 14 need parental permission to get married – unless, the law says, they have already been married before.
Mr. Ordover is no stranger to controversy, or to media attention. Mr. Ordover runs events for nudists and recently organized a Sheepshead Bay nude cruise, covered by the Times in July.
In 2000, he was also the co-creator of the now defunct humor site Technicalvirgin.com, in which a young actress described the creative ways in which she maintained her honor. Last year, when those videos enjoyed a resurgence on YouTube the actress who appeared in them, Melanie Martinez, was fired from a job hosting “The Good Night Show” on the PBS KIDS Sprout network – another Mr. Ordover-inspired saga covered by the paper.
Mr. Ordover was planning on coming clean next week as the creator of the site and has a full slate of radio interviews scheduled this week. He said he avoided spinning his fiction to print journalists who might get fired for falling for the scheme, but reasoned that radio shock jocks had looser leashes.
“We were trying to get people a little stirred up about this,” Mr. Ordover said.

It's a fake. The NY Times did a story on it, http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/11/please-dont-marry-our-daughters/?hp

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/11/please-dont-marry-our-daughters/?hp

Basically, the guy admits its satire.

This website url has changed. it is now:
http://marryourdaughter.org

All I can say is I wouldn't be surprised that due to the keywords found in the website that it's one set up by the government to help investigate child pornography & lure pedophiles.

Actually, on a radio show that plays from Denver, I hear them interviewing one of the meant that started this "service". It is disgusting and the radio DJs were disturbed and kept repeating that this interview was not a joke, etc. People we calling in very worried about this topic. It is actually REAL!!!!

I thought it might be a police sponsored site to find people who want to do illegal things such as selling girls off who aren't their daughters to get cash. Never know with how f'd up this world is. Just a theory, though. Either way, it's hilarious.

HOAX --- See the article that newsweek is putting out about the site and it's creator ---

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20781129/site/newsweek/?GT1=10357

"It's always a sure sign of a hoax when a site claiming to be a legitimate business has to stick google ads on its page"

????

Google ads are a perfectly legitimate way to bring traffic to your site. Why would you say such an ignorant thing?

Maybe my biz isnt Amazon.com, but it IS legit!

Please dont make claims like that without thinking first.

I have know idea if this did turn out to be a hoax but a radio station here interviewed one of the owners of this website. 93.1 Radio Now. It sure sounded real when he was talking about the site.

http://feministing.com/archives/007738.html#comments

more debunking.

It is completely fake and I know this for a fact because some of the images on the website were taken by myself and fellow photographer friends. Stolen images, fake profiles... if they are accepting money, it is a total scam.

rhonda, according to the reports I've read, the owner of the site claims to have gotten the photos from a service. If they were stolen, he didn't do it the service did. Presuming he isn't lying about that part of it.