Despite the Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) granted in the European Connections (EC) lawsuit (Georgia federal court)against Bush's Attorney General Gonzales in regard to the International Marriage Broker Regulation Act (IMBRA)...a new lawsuit was just filed last week where two American women lawyers present a much more comprehensive argument regarding the constitutionality of the law. See:
http://www.online-dating-rights.com/...
The IMBRA Law is a weird one. It is the first federal law that requires Internet dating customers to submit background forms in order to establish social contact with others. Even worse, the law requires that the background forms be approved by each specific person that an American wishes to contact before the words "hello" can be said. It was pushed by Democrats like Senator Maria Cantwell "to protect vulnerable women" in other countries who apparently cannot think for themselves, but then George Bush vigorously signed the bill on January 6th, 2006 to ingratiate himself with "Security Moms" and then FreeRepublic started deleting the accounts of all men with balls who didn't want "Security Moms" having the President's priority and then Fox News' Bill Oreilly and Tony Snow started a campaign to slander all men who would date or marry foreign women (derogatively referred to as "mail order brides").
If you know an American soldier, tell him that George Bush signed a law that said he cannot go to a Romanian bride site to meet someone in Bucharest when he goes on leave from the horrors of the Iraq War and wants to meet a new friend...(technically he can go to a foreign site not required to comply with IMBRA but then if he wants to marry a woman later on, the US embassy or consular officials can deny his fiance a visa to the USA because he met her on a non-compliant website).
The IMBRA Law is a nightmare because it is supported by all American politicians (but thankfully no judges so far).
In short, the new AODA lawsuit at first follows the EC argument that it is a violation of the 1st Amendment to require Americans to present their criminal background information and other potentially embarrassing information to foreign individuals whom one hasn't even had a chance to say "hello" to yet. The lawsuit notes that women, by human nature, will not respond to background forms even if they say a man has no criminal history (on dating sites, women will only respond to personally written emails with photos). The lawsuit does not mention that, since 50% of women on international dating sites only have telephone numbers but no email addresses, the IMBRA Law would take about 300,000 women's profiles off the Internet altogether until they get email addresses and comply.
But this law then goes into the Right to Association...stating among other precedents NAACP vs State of Alabama where it was said "the exposure of private relationships to government intermeddling can discourage the relationship from forming at all."
Imagine if you couldn't say hello to anyone on an anti-war website without first submitting to a federally mandated background check to confirm that you are "legitimate" and allowed by the federal government to procede to say hello to people on the website.
Now do you see why millions of American men are only now realizing that they don't like George Bush after voting for the clown in 2004 because of "national security"? He and Fox News are now more avid proponents of this flawed law then the Washington State feminists who wrote the law. The Security Moms on FreeRepublic are saying "if you don't have anything in your background that is bad, you have nothing to worry about with this new law."
The Ohio lawsuit, unlike the Georgia lawsuit, goes to lengths to show that socalled "mail order brides" suffer a rate of abuse of about 1% compared to "domestic American brides" whose American husbands abuse them at a rate of 7%. In the time it took less than 5 "mail order brides" to be murdered, thousands of American women were murdered by their American husbands and boyfriends (and several men were murdered by their "mail order brides"). The female lawyers explain that American men who date foreign women are mostly more sophisticated and better established then other American men (I assume they mean the kind of American guy who ends up marrying from within the local trailer park and then ends up beating his wife).
Finally...the Ohio lawsuit brings up the Right to Privacy including precedents on the Right to Marry (the Loving case in Virginia where a white woman was allowed to marry a black man)...as well as Roe vs Wade and other laws that deal with the intimate sphere of one's social life. Privacy is not a constitutional right, which the Republicans love to point out...but the past 80 years of Supreme Court decisions have shown that the right to privacy in matters of personal life and intimacy with others is what America is all about.
Not that the Right to Association and the Right of Free Speech weren't enough of an argument to win the lawsuit.
Meanwhile, tell any soldier you know that Tony Snow, the new White House Spokesman, openly sneers at American men who would date and marry a foreign woman. I've got him on tape saying this on Fox News.