Tuesday, August 28, 2012

No He Can't

by Anne Wortham

Fellow Americans,

Please know: I am black; I grew up in the segregated South. I did not vote for Barack Obama; I wrote in Ron Paul’s name as my choice for president. Most importantly, I am not race conscious. I do not require a black president to know that I am a person of worth, and that life is worth living. I do not require a black president to love the ideal of America.

I cannot join you in your celebration. I feel no elation. There is no smile on my face. I am not jumping with joy. There are no tears of triumph in my eyes. For such emotions and behavior to come from me, I would have to deny all that I know about the requirements of human flourishing and survival – all that I know about the history of the United States of America, all that I know about American race relations, and all that I know about Barack Obama as a politician. I would have to deny the nature of the "change" that Obama asserts has come to America. Most importantly, I would have to abnegate my certain understanding that you have chosen to sprint down the road to serfdom that we have been on for over a century. I would have to pretend that individual liberty has no value for the success of a human life. I would have to evade your rejection of the slender reed of capitalism on which your success and mine depend. I would have to think it somehow rational that 94 percent of the 12 million blacks in this country voted for a man because he looks like them (that blacks are permitted to play the race card), and that they were joined by self-declared "progressive" whites who voted for him because he doesn’t look like them. I would have to be wipe my mind clean of all that I know about the kind of people who have advised and taught Barack Obama and will fill posts in his administration – political intellectuals like my former colleagues at the Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

I would have to believe that "fairness" is equivalent of justice. I would have to believe that a man who asks me to "go forward in a new spirit of service, in a new service of sacrifice" is speaking in my interest. I would have to accept the premise of a man that economic prosperity comes from the "bottom up," and who arrogantly believes that he can will it into existence by the use of government force. I would have to admire a man who thinks the standard of living of the masses can be improved by destroying the most productive and the generators of wealth.

Finally, Americans, I would have to erase from my consciousness the scene of 125,000 screaming, crying, cheering people in Grant Park, Chicago irrationally chanting "Yes We Can!" Finally, I would have to wipe all memory of all the times I have heard politicians, pundits, journalists, editorialists, bloggers and intellectuals declare that capitalism is dead – and no one, including especially Alan Greenspan, objected to their assumption that the particular version of the anti-capitalistic mentality that they want to replace with their own version of anti-capitalism is anything remotely equivalent to capitalism.

So you have made history, Americans. You and your children have elected a black man to the office of the president of the United States, the wounded giant of the world. The battle between John Wayne and Jane Fonda is over – and that Fonda won. Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern must be very happy men. Jimmie Carter, too. And the Kennedys have at last gotten their Kennedy look-a-like. The self-righteous welfare statists in the suburbs can feel warm moments of satisfaction for having elected a black person. So, toast yourselves: 60s countercultural radicals, 80s yuppies and 90s bourgeois bohemians. Toast yourselves, Black America. Shout your glee Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Duke, Stanford, and Berkeley. You have elected not an individual who is qualified to be president, but a black man who, like the pragmatist Franklin Roosevelt, promises to – Do Something! You now have someone who has picked up the baton of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. But you have also foolishly traded your freedom and mine – what little there is left – for the chance to feel good. There is nothing in me that can share your happy obliviousness.

November 6, 2008

Anne Wortham [send her mail:awortha@ilstu.edu] is an individualist liberal who happens to be black and American.

Copyright © 2008 LewRockwell.com

Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Four Seconds

'PERFECT POSITION'

All the skaters – Canadians Sidney Crosby and Jarome Iginla and U.S. defencemen Brian Rafalski (nearest to Crosby) and Ryan Suter, are in perfect position, as is referee Bill McCreary. On soft, chewed-up ice, Crosby loses the puck near McCreary's feet as he carries it up the boards.

RON WILSON: U.S. head coach: "The puck hits the referee's skate – no one's mentioned that – and that ended up causing kind of a kerfuffle that happened in the corner and they took advantage of it."

BILL McCREARY: Referee: "If (the puck) did (hit me), I certainly didn't feel it. If it did, it certainly wasn't in favour of any team."

KELLY HRUDEY: CBC commentator, former goalie: "This is where Crosby first loses the puck in Bill McCreary's feet, but everybody's in perfect position. Rafalski's in great position, Suter's in great position with Iginla below the goalline, (Jamie) Langenbrunner is taking the point away at the top and (Zach) Parise's just sort of waiting in the weeds, waiting maybe for Crosby to make that pass (across to Drew Doughty and intercept it) and who knows? Maybe that's a break for the Americans at that point."

SLAMMING ON THE BRAKES

Crosby stops so suddenly with his left skate that a large cloud of icy snow is visible as he moves to regain the puck. Rafalski, standing back a stride, commits and jumps toward the boards and the puck. But Crosby gets there first with his right hand, pushing it along the boards toward Iginla. McCreary leaps out of the way and the puck reaches Iginla, who is covered by Suter. At this point, Parise is moving to cover a possible pass back to Canadian defenceman Drew Doughty.

RYAN SUTER: U.S. defenceman: "I saw the puck ... it was a 2-on-2 going up the wall."

MIKE BABCOCK: Canadian head coach."Sid's coming up the wall, the puck bumps into the referee's skate and that allows him to tap it back to Iggy and in turn, beat Rafalski off the wall. Because of that momentum going up the wall and (the puck) hitting the referee's skate, it got (Crosby, a left-handed shot) on the wrong side and in the end, it's those little things that make a difference. So that's how Sid got home free."

'STUCK ON THE WALL'

Rafalski starts turning his head to look for the puck while Crosby is already powerfully pushing off his left foot, jumping toward the net and gaining a step on the U.S. defenceman. Parise (9) senses Crosby's next move and turns toward his vulnerable goal.

PARISE: "I was trying to get back in and help. I saw Raffy stuck on the wall. So I was trying to get back and help out the (defence)."

BRIAN BURKE: GM of the U.S. team: "We saw Sidney coming off the boards and he got body position on our D."

'IGGY!'

"Iggy!" – the urgent yell can be heard above the din of the crowd, even on video. Crosby looks back for the pass from Iginla and receives it on his forehand as Suter pushes Iginla to the ice from behind.

IGINLA: "When he fed the puck back down the wall to me I heard him yell and I thought, 'My god, he's beat his guy' and I had to get the puck to him quickly. It was a give-and-go type of play and I kind of bobbled it but I did see that he got the pass as I was falling to the ice."

SUTER: "The puck squirted out right on (Crosby's) stick. You don't think about them scoring. You think about getting the puck after they turn it over and going the other way."

McCREARY: "I just heard a voice hollering. They holler at each other – drop it here, push it there – you hear the players talking and the communication between them is just incredible. I heard somebody hollering – obviously it was Crosby – and Iginla's battling with Suter, the defenceman, and (Iginla) gained position on him to make a pass. Then the check was finished on Iginla and he was knocked down. So I trailed the puck carrier, who was Crosby, to the net."

'HE MADE A GREAT READ'

Parise (9) rushes back to help with Crosby coming in alone on his goalie. Miller changes the grip on his stick to poke check, anticipating a deke. Crosby, his head initially down but his peripheral vision perhaps noticing Miller's adjustment, takes super quick shot instead.

CROSBY: "I just shot it."

MILLER: "He didn't even pick his head up. He knew where he wanted to go with it. He caught the pass on his forehand, turning his body. I thought I had time to step out and maybe take some space away – I'd been aggressive the whole tournament (and) I wasn't going to lose by sitting back in my net."

PARISE: "I couldn't get back there in time before he was alone, just him and Miller, in front of the net."

BURKE: "I thought Sidney was going to carry the puck in front of the net and (Miller) thought I'm going to poke it off his stick. The second Sidney saw Miller start to change his grip (on his stick) he made a great read. He released (the puck) in a heartbeat and the goaltender had no chance to react to it."

'IF HE SHOOTS, HE SCORES'

Crosby raises his arms in air, celebrating the goal, a split-second before anyone else knows that game is over and that Canada has won the gold.

CROSBY: "I think it went five-hole. I didn't even see it. I barely looked at the net, I just threw it there."

MILLER: "I was ... reading the play and I stepped out and just got beat. If he stickhandles once, I have him. If he shoots, he scores."

IGINLA: "I never saw him shoot or the puck go in. As I was getting up, I saw him with his arms in the air and I heard the roar of the crowd."

BURKE: "When it happens in real time, I don't know if the average person realizes just how crushing and sudden it is when you lose. We saw Sidney coming off the boards, he had body position on our D and then, when we saw him score, it was just like 'Oh ... (Burke trails off)."

LINDY RUFF: Canadian assistant coach: "When I saw a pair of gloves go up, I knew he had scored."

PARISE: "It was one of the worst feelings I've ever had."

What Islamic Science and Philosophy?

December 1, 2006 By Jonathan David Carson, Ph.D.

We know that we are being lied to. Sometimes we just don't realize how much we are being lied to.

The more sordid the Islamic present seems, the more we are told of the glories of the Islamic past. And the most glorious of the glories of Islam, the most enlightened of its enlightenments, are the "Islamic science" and "Islamic philosophy" of the Golden Age.

So what does Islamic law say about this science and this philosophy? According to Reliance of the Traveller: The Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law by Ahmad ibn Naqib al-Misri (d. 1368), they are unlawful, serious affronts to Islam, a form of apostasy. Apologists for Islam in the West brag about the "Islamic science" and "Islamic philosophy" that their accomplices in the Islamic world condemn.

Reliance of the Traveller lists the following sorts of "unlawful" knowledge:

(1) sorcery

(2) philosophy

(3) magic

(4) astrology

(5) the sciences of the materialists

(6) and anything that is a means to create doubts

The term "sciences of the materialists" requires explanation. It does not mean, as one might think, science that is based on the assumption that matter (and energy) is the sole constituent of the universe. Jews and Christians might agree that such "sciences of the materialists," if not "unlawful," at least present a truncated view of reality, omitting as they do the spiritual realm. It means, rather, according to the commentary of Reliance of the Traveller, the "conviction of materialists that things in themselves or by their own nature have a causal influence independent of the will of Allah. To believe this is unbelief that puts one beyond the pale of Islam."

At issue here is not the existence of the spiritual realm, but the condemnation by al-Ghazali in The Incoherence of the Philosophers of "the judgment of the philosophers," first of all Avicenna, "that the connection that is observed to exist between causes and effects is a necessary relation, and that there is no capability or possibility of bringing the cause into existence without the effect, nor the effect without the cause." Causes and effects are inadmissible, according to al-Ghazali, because causes limit the absolute freedom of Allah to bring about whatever events he wills. Effects are brought about, not by causes, but by the direct will of Allah.

We see then that the condemnation of "the sciences of the materialists" and the condemnation of philosophy are really the same condemnation and that the condemnation of "the sciences of the materialists" is a condemnation of far more than secular science, extending as it does to any analysis of causes and effects, whether materialist or not. It extends even to any discussion of the nature of any object, whether material or spiritual, because the nature of an object conditions how it affects and is affected by other objects. So in the end the condemnation of "the sciences of the materialists" is a condemnation of any effort to understand anything.

Averroes replied to The Incoherence of the Philosophers in The Incoherence of the Incoherence, so al-Ghazali, whose views inform Reliance of the Traveller in particular and mainstream Islam in general, attacked Avicenna, one of the two greatest of the "Islamic philosophers," who was defended by the other, Averroes.

And we are told by the entire decrepit establishment that we should honor the "Islamic philosophy" of the Golden Age!

There is, however, a still closer connection between the philosophy and "the sciences of the materialists" declared unlawful by Reliance of the Traveller. Without a notion of cause and effect, science is impossible, and the acceptance by Islam of al-Ghazali's views meant that science in the Islamic world could develop only in opposition to a fundamental tenet of Islam.

If the true cause of events is the will of Allah, and if the will of Allah is inscrutable, then the causes of events are inscrutable and science a vain pursuit. The issue is ultimately whether the universe and its creator are in any way intelligible. The West, with its traditions of natural law and natural theology, agrees for the most part that the universe is astonishingly intelligible and God somewhat so. Islam, at least at its most rigorous, denies any intelligibility whatsoever to either.

The seriousness of the condemnation of philosophy and science by Reliance of the Traveller can be seen in its list of "Acts That Entail Leaving Islam." Belief "that things in themselves or by their own nature have any causal influence independent of the will of Allah" is apostasy.

In contrast, the Jewish and Christian worlds have been informed by the notion of secondary causes propounded by Moses Maimonides and Saint Thomas Aquinas. God works, at least most of the time, through the laws of nature, via causes. Just as our wills can be both free and subject to God, and divine foreknowledge does not foreclose the contingency of earthly events, God and nature cooperate in the production of effects.

Thus, nature both has its own laws and remains subject to the will of God. The laws of nature place no limitation on the freedom of God, and science can investigate natural causes without trespassing in the divine realm. Indeed, science, by investigating the operations of nature, simultaneously elucidates divine providence. Far from being "unlawful," science is, in this view, completely compatible with the worship of God, indeed more than simply compatible because it is the product of a desire to know God, a desire even for a divine intimacy.

There are two Bibles, as it were, Holy Scripture and the Book of Nature. The heavens declare the glory of God, and the things that are unseen are known by the things that are seen. That science as an institution has been corrupted by bad philosophy and worse theology in no way negates the fundamental compatibility of true science and true religion.

The importance of "occasionalism," the doctrine that events are brought about by the direct will of God, not by natural causes, for Islam and for the West's differences with it is emphasized in the following statement of Majid Fakhry: In fact it is no exaggeration to say that a number of distinctively Islamic notions such as fatalism, utter resignation to God, the surrender of personal endeavour, belief in the unqualified transcendence of God, etc., cannot be fully understood except in the perspective of the occasionalist world-view. (Islamic Occasionalism) This doctrine is at the heart of Islam. Avicenna, Averroes, Maimonides, and Aquinas warned us against it, but now university, scientific establishment, media, State Department, and even corporate America, elites of every sort, pretend that Avicenna and Averroes are the paragons of Islamic philosophy and Maimonides and Aquinas their best pupils and thus in debt to Islam. If we are going to escape humiliation, madness, and death, we are going to have to educate ourselves and fight for even the simplest and most obvious of truths. The establishment is certainly not going to do it for us.

Contact Jonathan David Carson, Ph.D. For more information, see his website.

Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young

Mary Schmich
June 1, 1997

Inside every adult lurks a graduation speaker dying to get out, some world-weary pundit eager to pontificate on life to young people who'd rather be Rollerblading. Most of us, alas, will never be invited to sow our words of wisdom among an audience of caps and gowns, but there's no reason we can't entertain ourselves by composing a Guide to Life for Graduates.
I encourage anyone over 26 to try this and thank you for indulging my attempt.Ladies and gentlemen of the class of '97:
Wear sunscreen.
If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience. I will dispense this advice now.
Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. Oh, never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they've faded. But trust me, in 20 years, you'll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can't grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked. You are not as fat as you imagine.
Don't worry about the future. Or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4 p.m. on some idle Tuesday.
Do one thing every day that scares you.
Sing.
Don't be reckless with other people's hearts. Don't put up with people who are reckless with yours.
Floss.
Don't waste your time on jealousy. Sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind. The race is long and, in the end, it's only with yourself.
Remember compliments you receive. Forget the insults. If you succeed in doing this, tell me how.
Keep your old love letters. Throw away your old bank statements.
Stretch.
Don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn't know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don't.
Get plenty of calcium. Be kind to your knees. You'll miss them when they're gone.
Maybe you'll marry, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll have children, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll divorce at 40, maybe you'll dance the funky chicken on your 75th wedding anniversary. Whatever you do, don't congratulate yourself too much, or berate yourself either. Your choices are half chance. So are everybody else's.
Enjoy your body. Use it every way you can. Don't be afraid of it or of what other people think of it. It's the greatest instrument you'll ever own.
Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but your living room.
Read the directions, even if you don't follow them.
Do not read beauty magazines. They will only make you feel ugly.
Get to know your parents. You never know when they'll be gone for good. Be nice to your siblings. They're your best link to your past and the people most likely to stick with you in the future.
Understand that friends come and go, but with a precious few you should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle, because the older you get, the more you need the people who knew you when you were young.
Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard. Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft. Travel.
Accept certain inalienable truths: Prices will rise. Politicians will philander. You, too, will get old. And when you do, you'll fantasize that when you were young, prices were reasonable, politicians were noble and children respected their elders.
Respect your elders.
Don't expect anyone else to support you. Maybe you have a trust fund. Maybe you'll have a wealthy spouse. But you never know when either one might run out.
Don't mess too much with your hair or by the time you're 40 it will look 85.
Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it's worth.
But trust me on the sunscreen.
Copyright © 2012, Chicago Tribune





























Guilty Verdict In Mo Hassan Case

Originally at HillBuzz, but an alert reader notified me that the link is now dead. Also at:

Yesterday, Muzzammil Hassan, the Buffalo Muslim TV station owner, was found guilty of second degree murder. In 2009, this low life scumbag stabbed his wife Aasiya 40 times before beheading her. She had just filed for divorce (with a restraining order) the week before the murder. Watch the video (below) and you will see just how smug and evil this creature is and I love the fact that it only took the jury 1 hour to convict him. I just hope that he gets the maximum sentence allowed but it still won't be harsh enough.

Domestic violence to men happens, and goes underreported and is often even laughed off. Women have less muscle mass than men and are usually physically weaker, but they can do plenty of damage with a blunt object or a gun.

Unfortunately, you sometimes hear guilty people defend themselves by appropriating the language of others' legitimate defenses, like parental alienation, which I hear a good deal about from some men who write me (and these men typically aren't pleading any case to me or looking for me to do anything for them; they're typically just looking for some words of sympathy back).

This guy, however, writes Phyllis Chesler, is actually "a man with a long and terrible history of physically and psychologically battering three wives and physically and psychologically abusing his children as well--he once punched his 13-year-old son in the nose."

Chesler's whole piece on this case (at the above link) is very interesting. She notes that Hassan is from Pakistan (and, I'll note that the culture is not just Pakistani, but Muslim):

In 2009, I received an extraordinary report which documented honor killings in Pakistan. My Pakistani informant, of the SW Community Development Department, in Sind, Pakistan, sent me an unpublished paper in which he describes and explains a murderous Pakistani culture very carefully. He writes: Male control does not only extend to a woman's body and her sexual behavior but all of her behavior, including her movements, her language and her actions. In any of these areas, defiance by women translates into undermining male honor and ultimately family and community honor. Severe punishments are reported for bringing food late, for talking back or for undertaking forbidden trips, etc. A man's honor defiled by a woman's alleged or real sexual misdemeanor or other defiance is only partly restored by killing her. He also has to kill the man allegedly involved. Since [the woman] is murdered first, the [man] often hears about it and flees, aided by the fact that unlike the woman, he is both familiar with the world outside the house and can move freely in it. But [men] who escape will not be able to return to normal life. Nobody will give such a man shelter; he remains on the run until he and his family are ready to negotiate with the victim, the man whose honour the [man] defiled. The balance is restored by negotiating compensation for damages. Moreover, there are few safe places for a woman to escape to. Seeking help outside the family is fraught with danger for a woman. Not only does society blame a woman for being targeted for murder-the popular perception being that she must somehow deserve it-but by seeking outside help she risks being sent back to her husband or father in whose custody she is perceived to belong. Most important by seeking help outside, she adds shame to her husband and his family by making the issue public. No Kari ["black" woman marked for honor-killing] who escapes is ever forgiven, even if her innocence is recognized; some men are known to have traveled hundreds of miles to find and kill Karis, even years after the alleged misdeed.

More from Chesler:

Hassan could not stop being a Pakistani Muslim man. What does this mean? It means that he still felt entitled to control, monitor, harass, and physically batter his wife. When he physically punished her, it was viewed as "correcting" her mistakes. When she went to the hospital and filed a police report--when she had black eyes, bruises, cuts--he viewed her exposing him as "humiliating attacks," indeed, as "terrorist attacks." When she said that she was going to file for divorce, he viewed that as "killing him;" in addition, he began to fear that these police and hospital reports plus a divorce with such facts stated might jeopardize his dream of a pro-Muslim television network. Her attempts to defend herself from his physical violence, e.g. sitting on her, trying to run her car off the road (2007), beating her so viciously that his son from a previous marriage who lived with them had to use a whole roll of toilet paper to stanch the flow of blood, dragging her across their driveway, blackening her eyes, breaking windows (2009), etc., were seen by him as "abuse." In other words, her attempt to defend herself against his violence was something he experienced as "abusive" to him.

Many Pakistani men in America have killed their wives and their daughters. In my studies published at Middle East Quarterly, I found that honor killing victims comprised two very different groups: One victim group had an average age of 17; the second victim group had an average age of 36. Aasiya was 37 when Muzzammil murdered her. I also found that one feature of an honor killing is "overkill." The victims are tortuously murdered, burned, raped, mutilated, stoned, even beheaded, as was the case with Aasiya. At trial (which is still ongoing) it became clear that Muzzammil attacked his unarmed wife with two hunting knives and stabbed her at least 40 times before he beheaded her--a signature Islamist-era gesture.

| Comments (20)

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Comments

Maybe life in prison with regular people will get him to where he needs to be -- realizing that he was in the wrong.

Posted by: Jim P. at February 11, 2011 1:55 AM

Um, no. This is what the death penalty is for, we put rabid dogs down to protect society, there is no difference. Posted by: Kat at February 11, 2011 4:16 AM

"Unfortunately, you sometimes hear guilty people defend themselves by appropriating the language of others' legitimate defenses ... "

This is the really stomach churning bit about this asshole's defense. It's a lot like women who claim rape when it didn't happen. It weakens the case of many women who are legitimately raped. Thankfully, nobody bought it in this case, but it speaks to this sub-human's character that he would take a shot at such a defense.

"Domestic violence to men happens, and goes underreported and is often even laughed off. Women have less muscle mass than men and are usually physically weaker, but they can do plenty of damage with a blunt object or a gun."

Speaking as a former abused husband, you start off on the right foot here, but then falter. It's not about muscle mass and ability to do damage. Obviously, most any healthy male human will win a physical battle 100% of the time against most any woman. But a man will never hit her back. He will jam his hands into his pockets and do his best to get as far away as he can, even under threat of knives and death. There is a difference between a male human and a man. A man would certainly not stab her 40 times and separate her head from the rest of her.

This little bitch with an enlarged clitoris that calls himself a man has no defense.

Posted by: whistleDick at February 11, 2011 4:56 AM

Why was it only second degree? Could they not prove he planned it? Now they can't kill him (although I'm thinking New York doesn't even have the death penalty. They should.)

Maybe life in prison will get the dog raped and stabbed to death. One can hope, and even prisoners have standards. A muslim may fight right in with those standards though, who knows. I wonder if a "true" muslim coming in and showing them his disdain will make the converted black prison muslims think twice? Probably not.

Posted by: momof4 at February 11, 2011 5:39 AM

This is why I say that any woman who willingly converts to islam should be killed immediately. It's quicker and less painful for her that way.

Posted by: brian at February 11, 2011 5:40 AM

Every generation thinks they live in an enlightened era, where systematic violence cannot reach them.

They've all been wrong. If you think this, you're wrong, too - and an attitude of "everything will be all right" is ridiculously ineffective.

Islam is bringing the Illearth Stone to you so you can bow before it, lured and sustained by the idea of subjugating others. Tolerance is not the antidote to this.

Posted by: Radwaste at February 11, 2011 5:42 AM

I don't know a lot about this case, but from what I've seen here and elsewhere, it doesn't seem to be an "honor killing". It seems like the press just jumped on that idea to sell papers.

From this clip, there doesn't seem to be any religious "honor" motivation from it at all. He certainly isn't using that as a defense, as one might expect from a religious zealot. This guy may be just an angry, bullying, needle-dicked, douche bag who happens to be from an Islamic background.

I'm not sticking up for Islam, but it doesn't seem like it can be blamed for this one. The guy is just the same kind of run-of-the-mill sicko that can be found in any culture.

Posted by: whistleDick at February 11, 2011 5:54 AM

This is how Islam treats women http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/02/11/photo-disfigured-afghan-woman-wins-prize/?test=latestnews To say that it is not cultural, or to try and blame it on backwards tribalism ignores cases like this one, and the one here in AZ where the guy Ran Over his daughter with his car because she was "too westernized". You want to know the saddest part? Half the time, the females in the family have been so brainwashed that they help the murderous assholes kill the girls trying to get away. These are well educated, well employed people living in civilized countries bringing this shit to our doors, and they expect to get away with it. Fuck that.

Posted by: Kat at February 11, 2011 6:10 AM

there doesn't seem to be any religious "honor" motivation from it at all.

I thought that at first, but actually, "honor killing" is really about the man's honor or the family's being harmed -- the man being humiliated by the woman. And that's here -- how dare she report him, etc.

Read the whole Phyllis Chesler piece at the link, and the other link, too (at the bottom).

Posted by: Amy Alkon at February 11, 2011 7:31 AM

There's a passage in Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Nomad: From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations, that explains -- how women, under Islam, are:

"the breeders of men, and women's honor lies in their purity, their submission, their obedience. Their shame is to be sexually impure, and it is the worst shame of all, because a woman's sexual disobedience defiles herself, her sisters, and her mother, as well as the male relatives whose duty it is to control her. No Muslim man has any standing in society if he does not have honor. And no matter how much honor he builds up through wise decisions and good deeds, it is destroyed if his daughter or his sister is sexually defiled. This can happen if she loses her virginity before she's married, or if she engages in sexual intercourse outside of the marriage -- and that includes rape. Even the rumor that she may have had sex is reason enough to label her "defiled" and lead to loss of honor for her whole family. A father who cannot control his daughters, a brother who cannot control his sisters, is disgraced. He is bankrupt socially and even economically. His family is ruined. The girl will not fetch a bride-price, and neither will her sisters or her cousins, because the mere suspicion of independent feeling and female action in their family taints them too.

Posted by: Amy Alkon at February 11, 2011 7:37 AM

Since the subject of how we use language to manipulate has been brought up...

"This little bitch with an enlarged clitoris that calls himself a man has no defense."

Seriously? Can we stop using "female" as an insult? Especially when discussing gender-specific violence? It does smack of the notion that one gender is lesser than the other...

Posted by: hahahathud at February 11, 2011 8:38 AM

People use both sexes as an insult when they believe the person is acting inappropriately to their sex. There's a whole website that attacks me by calling me a man with some regularity. People also do it to Ann Coulter and Hillary Clinton. A transsexual activist I know told me that weak people commonly do this to women when they're threatened by how powerful they are. Not surprisingly, my biggest detractor is a 52-year-old unsuccessful actor from New York who mentions his high school accomplishments on his LinkedIn profile. (I barely remember where I went to high school, let alone still reference it!)

Posted by: Amy Alkon at February 11, 2011 8:55 AM

The fundamental difference between us and them is this:

We derive our honor from our actions. They derive their honor from the actions of others.

That fundamental fuckup on their part is why they will never be able to join the modern world. It is a central tenet of their existence that humans are not autonomous individuals with free will and moral agency. Posted by: brian at February 11, 2011 9:46 AM

At first I thought life in prison with Bubba would be appropriate for this punk. Then I realized these sort of guys have no problem with other men or sheep. Therefore, life in a women's prison would seem to be more appropiate.

Posted by: Dave B at February 11, 2011 11:36 AM

The patriarchy leaves "battered men no legal way out"?! Are you fucking kidding me?! First of all.. pretty sure patriarchy isn't doing that, second of all.. no legal way out?! Guy, you're in America, where divorce is legal.. it's not a matter of legality, it's your "false belief" in disgusting honor killing. He's insane. To say there is no legal way out, and basically that he had to brutally murder his wife to get out is just insane.

Posted by: Angie at February 11, 2011 1:49 PM

Angie - islamists are not rational by Western standards of rationality. To grant a woman a divorce that she initiated is to lose face, which is not an acceptable "way out" for the man.

Either HE initiates the divorce, or he kills her. That's it. So, since he's legally forbidden to kill her in America and he doesn't want a divorce, there's "no legal way out."

Once you learn to reason like a crazy man, islam makes perfect sense.

Posted by: brian at February 11, 2011 1:56 PM

whistleDick: This little bitch with an enlarged clitoris that calls himself a man has no defense.

If you want to insult the guy, insult him. However, trying to degrade him by likening him to a woman is sexist. There's nothing wrong with being a woman.

Posted by: Patrick at February 11, 2011 4:17 PM

"People use both sexes as an insult when they believe the person is acting inappropriately to their sex"

Oh I know - I am guilty of it myself, but the problem with it is the REASON it's an insult - because the "other" is somehow lesser.

It ranks up there with guys calling each other gay. It's an insult because of cultural bias.

The insult-er is not implying the insult-ee is different, they are implying they are a lower form of humanity.

Posted by: hahahathud at February 11, 2011 5:09 PM

"Unfortunately, you sometimes hear guilty people defend themselves by appropriating the language of others' legitimate defenses ... This is the really stomach churning bit about this asshole's defense. "

That just screams "narcissistic personality disorder", doesn't it? Dr. Tara at Shrink4Men recently described it using an acronym I hadn't seen before, "DARVO" -- Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. The narc hijacks the victim's defense by stealing the language, and then turns it around on the victim.

I can see how Islam could be very attractive to male NPDs. They'd love a "religion" that tells them that they are Special People in God's eyes, and that all of their problems have external causes. That's exactly what a narc wants to hear. Posted by: Cousin Dave at February 11, 2011 8:28 PM

"Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. The narc hijacks the victim's defense by stealing the language, and then turns it around on the victim"

In effect, the perpetrator is attempting to "extend" the assault on a victim by attempting to subvert the mechanisms society uses against perpetrators (the police and justice system etc.), against the victim. It's really just another form of abuse. It's similar to how an abuser may call the police on a victim, effectively wielding their power against the victim, using them as the tool/weapon of abuse. People often don't recognize this as another form of abuse. Women sometimes do this against men, calling the police (or even 'big friends') for no reason and implying they felt threatened - the woman abuser may be physically weaker but she makes up for it by utilizing 'big friends' or 'the police' as the weapon. (It's also like that teacher Delynn Woodside who had a child arrested for having a sharpie, I think that's a form of child abuse, that will have a terrible affect on a child, yet she gets to appear to have clean hands, unlike more direct child abusers.)

I think the whole "narcissism" thing is totally overblown though. These days anyone does anything and someone shouts "narcissist". Like we've been conditioned like Pavlov's dogs to search for the faintest signals of narcissism, our narcissism-meters set to "hyper-sensitive".

Psychologically, we enjoy it because it's a medical-sounding "tool" that we get to use to bash people 'anyone we don't like'. Don't like your brother-in-law? Just say "oh he's SUCH a narcissist!" ... it's dumbed down to the point where it's just a day to day insult for "anyone we don't like".

NPD is apparently no longer going to be recognized as a disorder, seemingly:

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/29/narcissism-no-longer-a-psychiatric-disorder/

I say thankfully, it's really just a set of personality traits, and one that, while it may have limited application, have been very much over-vilified. I see the over-vilification of those traits as an extension of the anti-male trend, as those traits are the types typically seen in male leaders, often business leaders, like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. Traits that direct people to achieve great things are not inherently bad. What society is effectively signalling is a visceral kind of culturally-Marxist anti-success tear-down-anyone-who-tries-to-succeed make-everyone-equally-low impulse. We've been pathologizing all the personality traits that historically have been channeled to drive men to be competitive and successful.

Posted by: Lobster at February 15, 2011 5:43 AM

Villamosmérnöki és Informatikai Kar jubileumi diplomaátadás (VIK)

Villamosmérnöki és Informatikai Kar jubileumi diplomaátadás (VIK)

Monday, August 20, 2012

Wed to Strangers, Vietnamese Wives Build Korean Lives




KWANGMYONG, South Korea — The two couples’ baby girls were born last month only two days apart, the younger one on the morning of the Lunar New Year. Each girl, everyone later agreed, had her Korean father’s forehead and her Vietnamese mother’s nose.


Seokyong Lee for The New York Times
Mr. Kim and Ms. Vien’s daughter, Dan-bi, was born last month, giving them a new bond as parents.

Seokyong Lee for The New York Times
To Thi Vien, left, moved from Vietnam to a city near Seoul when she married Kim Wan-su. She lives with him and his relatives, including his sister, right, and their mother, who says that the marriage to a foreigner will doom the family.
It was one year ago that the girls’ fathers had gone to Vietnam and, in the first two hours of a five-day marriage tour, plucked their mothers out of two dozen prospective brides at the Lucky Star karaoke bar in Hanoi.
Bound by fate and the rhythms of immigration bureaus, the brides, Bui Thi Thuy and To Thi Vien, had landed together in South Korea wondering what kind of place this would be and how their husbands would treat them.
“I feel we share a special bond because we were married on the same date and we both married Korean men,” Ms. Vien said. “We’re the same age and we became mothers almost at the same time.”
And so both new mothers now follow Korean custom by eating seaweed soup to recover their strength. Here in Kwangmyong, a city outside Seoul with a concentration of foreign workers and foreign women married to Korean men, Ms. Vien, 23, lives at the family home of her husband, Kim Wan-su, 40, a factory worker. Ms. Thuy, 23, settled with her husband, Kim Tae-goo, 56, in Yongju, a rural town southeast of Seoul where they grow apples.
The two couples, whose five-day courtship, wedding and honeymoon in Vietnam were described a year ago in an article in The New York Times, are part of a social phenomenon in South Korea. A combination of factors — including the rising social status of Korean women and a surplus of bachelors resulting from a traditional preference for sons — is forcing many Korean men to seek brides in Southeast and Central Asia and China.
In a country that defines itself as ethnically homogenous, marriages to foreigners accounted for one of eight marriages in 2006, more than triple the rate in 2000. In working-class areas southwest of Seoul, like Kwangmyong, community centers now offer services for foreign wives: Korean language classes, assistance with childbirth and for victims of domestic violence, advice on living in South Korea and with the in-laws.
But cultural gaps sometimes make it difficult to reach out to such wives.
“Chinese wives have their own outside network, so they tend to be assertive, and women from the Philippines speak English, so they are confident, but other women, like the Vietnamese, are shy about seeking advice and expressing their problems,” said Kim Myung-soon, a social worker at the Yeongdeungpo Social Welfare Center near here. “They tend to be submissive and smile at their in-laws even if there are problems. And one day they’re gone.”
Han Kuk-yeom, president of the Korea Women Migrants Human Rights Center, a private organization, said the government had not done enough to secure the rights of foreign wives or protect them from abuse.
Some men believe they are permitted to mistreat the women because they paid for the marriage tours and the weddings, and tend to look down on women from poorer countries, Ms. Han said. And the booming international marriage industry has drawn increasingly poor and vulnerable women here.
“Until about three years ago, more educated women tended to come to Korea, but as there are more international marriages, less educated and poorer women are coming to Korea,” Ms. Han said. “And they seem to have a harder time adapting to life in Korea, learning the language and so on.”
Divorce has risen among Korean men married to foreigners, according to government statistics. But it is too early to draw meaningful comparisons with the divorce rate of marriages between Koreans, which has also risen sharply in recent years.
Given the way they meet, both Korean husbands and their foreign wives have anxieties, as Kim Wan-su, removing ear plugs, explained during a lunch break from his job at a car key factory.
While foreign wives worry about how their husbands will treat them, Korean men harbor suspicions that the women married them merely to qualify for work here and to send money to their parents. When Ms. Vien’s parents in Vietnam heard that a Vietnamese bride in Korea had killed herself, they called in a panic. And Mr. Kim fretted after hearing that three brides who had come to South Korea through his wife’s agency had left their husbands shortly after arriving.
“I was worried that my wife would run away, too, but I’m not worried anymore,” Mr. Kim said. “We have a child, and we are a family. My wife didn’t come here to make money.”
While Mr. Kim was at work, Ms. Vien was taking care of their newborn at home. With the birth of their daughter, Dan-bi, Ms. Vien had stopped going twice a week to the local community center where she had befriended a woman from her home, Van Don Island, in Vietnam’s northeast. Ms. Vien had dropped out of college, where she had studied management, because her father, a farmer, could not afford the tuition.
In Kwangmyong, the couple lives with Mr. Kim’s mother and his older sister’s family — a total of nine people — on one floor of a three-story brick building on a narrow street. The older sister, Kim Ho-sook, had welcomed Ms. Vien and helped deflect the Kims’ 80-year-old mother, who was unhappy about the arrival of a foreign bride and said repeatedly that it would lead to the family’s downfall.
Last fall, the day before the couple held an elaborate wedding ceremony here after their quick wedding in Hanoi, the elderly mother — whose unhappiness was compounded by Alzheimer’s disease — ran away from home for 12 hours. The family tried to hide her disappearance from Ms. Vien and her parents, who had come to South Korea for the wedding. “But somehow Vien guessed what was happening and she started crying,” the sister-in-law said.
Last month, the day before Ms. Vien was scheduled to leave the hospital, her mother-in-law disappeared again, displeased that the baby was not a son.
“My mother still won’t even look at the baby,” the sister-in-law said. “She tells me not to like the child because it’s not a boy.”
Complicating matters, doctors recently diagnosed a hole in the baby’s heart and are not sure whether it will close on its own.
“I miss my mother a lot, especially these days,” Ms. Vien said. “I’m Vietnamese and everyone around me is Korean, so I feel a lot more ease talking to my mother. We can be on the phone for hours.”
On a recent Sunday afternoon, with the baby sleeping peacefully, Ms. Vien seemed in better spirits. She and her husband sat on the living room couch, often holding hands and showing the kind of affection they had displayed during the first week of their meeting.
Both said they were more committed than ever to building a life together, though they acknowledged gaps in culture and language. Their biggest arguments have occurred after he has gone drinking with co-workers and broken a promise to come home at a certain hour.
“I’m a working man, and she doesn’t understand that going out drinking with your co-workers is a necessity in Korean culture,” Mr. Kim said. “I feel that Vien thinks I didn’t keep my promise because she’s from a foreign country and I look down on her.”
Ms. Vien said that was not the case. “I’m your wife, and I don’t like it when you come home so late; nobody in the family likes that,” she said. “I get frustrated and worried. If I were Korean, I’d be less worried, because I’d understand exactly where you were. But I don’t.”
Ms. Thuy said, as she tucked in her daughter, Hyo-min, in the one-story red brick house that her husband, Kim Tae-goo, recently had built in Yongju, a two-hour drive from Seoul, “I’m going crazy because I can’t communicate with my husband.”
Ms. Thuy (pronounced TOO-ey), who finished high school in her hometown, Quang Yen, in northeastern Vietnam and soon after started seeking a husband, said she found learning Korean difficult. But Mr. Kim said she was not trying hard enough.
“She’ll repeat a word just a couple of times and then give up,” Mr. Kim said. “She should appreciate the fact that I’m trying to teach her. Our biggest arguments have been over this.”
“He doesn’t try to speak Vietnamese,” she said, adding that he knew only how to say “hello” and “how are you?”
They live with Mr. Kim’s mother and his 17-year-old daughter from his first marriage. (His first wife was Korean.) At home, though, Ms. Thuy seldom speaks with her in-laws.
“My daughter referred to her only once as ‘mother,’” Mr. Kim said. “But my mother and daughter don’t dislike Thuy.”
Ms. Thuy has yet to make friends outside. Although several other Vietnamese wives live in the area, Ms. Thuy, in a sign of the lingering regionalism seen among many Vietnamese wives, does not socialize with them because they are from Ho Chi Minh City, the former Saigon, in the south.
“They’re from Ho Chi Minh, so whenever I run into them, we greet each other,” she said, adding that she found it difficult to befriend them.
The birth of their daughter, coinciding with a lull in the apple farming season, has given the marriage fresh meaning, the couple said. Mr. Kim, who participated little in child-rearing during his first marriage, is now actively involved, scouring the Internet for information on everything from breast milk to hiccupping to diapers, while Ms. Thuy never lets the child out of her sight.
Sometimes they reminisce about their first meeting at the Lucky Star in Hanoi.
He picked her, she teased, only after his first three choices had turned him down. He had seemed rich, she said, and she liked that he was a farmer, like her father.
“I would have led a much more difficult life in Vietnam, because people are still poor there,” she said.
He indicated that he was glad about the outcome, too. “I don’t want to sound as if I’m looking down on Thuy,” he said. “But if I had married someone who was more educated or taller, I don’t think she would have been happy here with me. So I think we are a good match for each other.”

Su-hyun Lee contributed reporting from Seoul, South Korea.

Saturday, August 18, 2012

BIG GOVERNMENT

Originally at,

The church of big government

but an alert reader noticed the link is dead. Now at:

Mr. KYL. Madam President, Mark Steyn is one of the most gifted writers of our time. His trenchant analysis appears regularly in National Review. Steyn writes with biting humor and personal experience with government censorship and has chronicled the concomitant growth in government power and loss of freedom in Europe and North America.

In the March 5, 2012, issue of National Review he warns that America, which he calls the ‘‘last religious Nation in the Western world,’’ is in danger of going the way of European nations in replacing faith and family with the all powerful national government as the source of everything we need. He calls his piece ‘‘The Church of Big Government.’’ It reminds me of Barry Goldwater’s warning that ‘‘a government big enough to give you everything you want is a government that is big enough to take away everything you have.’’

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that this article be printed in the RECORD. There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:

[From the National Review, Mar. 5, 2012]

THE CHURCH OF BIG GOVERNMENT LEVIATHAN IS NIBBLING YOUR RELIGIOUS FREEDOM AWAY (By Mark Steyn)

Discussing the constitutionality of Obamacare’s ‘‘preventive health’’ measures on MSNBC, Melinda Henneberger of the Washington Post told Chris Matthews that she reasons thus with her liberal friends:

‘‘Maybe the Founders were wrong to guarantee free exercise of religion in the First Amendment, but they did.’’

Maybe. A lot of other constitutional types in the Western world have grown increasingly comfortable with circumscribing religious liberty. In 2002, the Swedish constitution was amended to criminalize criticism of homosexuality. ‘‘Disrespect’’ of the differently orientated became punishable by up to two years in jail, and ‘‘especially offensive’’ disrespect by up to four years. Shortly thereafter, Pastor Ake Green preached a sermon referencing the more robust verses of scripture, and was convicted of ‘‘hate crimes’’ for doing so.

Conversely, the 1937 Irish Constitution recognized ‘‘the special position of the Holy Catholic Apostolic and Roman Church as the guardian of the Faith.’’ But times change. In 2003, the Vatican issued a ruminative document on homosexual unions. The Irish Council for Civil Liberties warned Catholic bishops that merely distributing the statement could lead to prosecution under the 1989 Incitement to Hatred Act, and six months in the slammer.

In Canada, Hugh Owens took out an advertisement in the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix, and he and the paper wound up getting fined $9,000 for ‘‘exposing homosexuals to hatred or ridicule.’’ Here is the entire text of the offending advertisement:

Romans 1:26

Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13

I Corinthians 6:9

That’s it. Mr. Owens cited chapter and verse—and nothing but. Yet it was enough for the Saskatchewan ‘‘Human Rights’’ Tribunal. The newspaper accepted the fine; Mr. Owens appealed. That was in 1997. In 2002, the Court of Queen’s Bench upheld the conviction. Mr. Owens appealed again. In 2006, the Court of Appeal reversed the decision. This time the ‘‘Human Rights’’ Commission appealed. The supreme court of Canada heard the case last autumn, and will issue its judgment sometime this year—or a decade and a half after Mr. Owens’s original conviction. It doesn’t really matter which way their Lordships rule. If you were to attempt to place the same advertisement with the Star-Phoenix or any other Canadian paper today, they would all politely decline. So, in practical terms, the ‘‘Human Rights’’ Tribunal has achieved its goal: It has successfully shriveled the public space for religious expression—and, ultimately, for ‘‘exercise of religion.’’

In the modern era, America has been different. It is the last religious nation in the Western world, the last in which a majority of the population are (kinda) practicing believers and (sorta) regular attenders of church. The ‘‘free exercise’’—or free market—enabled religion to thrive. Elsewhere, the established church, whether de jure (the Church of England, the Church of Denmark) or de facto (as in Catholic Italy and Spain), did for religion what the state monopoly did for the British car industry. As the Episcopal and Congregational churches degenerated into a bunch of mushy doubt-ridden wimps, Americans went elsewhere. As the Lutheran Church of Sweden underwent similar institutional decay, Swedes gave up on God entirely.

Nevertheless, this distinction shouldn’t obscure an important truth—that, in America as in Europe, the mainstream churches were cheerleaders for the rise of their usurper: the Church of Big Government. Instead of the Old World’s state church or the New World’s separation of church and state, most of the West now believes in the state as church—an all-powerful deity who provides day-care for your babies and takes your aged parents off your hands. America’s Catholic hierarchy, in particular, colluded in the redefinition of the tiresome individual obligation to Christian charity as the painless universal guarantee of state welfare. Barack Obama himself provided the neatest distillation of this convenient transformation when he declared, in a TV infomercial a few days before his election, that his ‘‘fundamental belief’’ was that ‘‘I am my brother’s keeper.’’

Back in Kenya, his brother lived in a shack on $12 a year. If Barack is his brother’s keeper, why can’t he shove a sawbuck and a couple singles in an envelope and double the guy’s income? Ah, well: When the president claims that ‘‘I am my brother’s keeper,’’ what he means is that the government should be his brother’s keeper. And, for the most part, the Catholic Church agreed. They were gung ho for Obamacare. It never seemed to occur to them that, if you agitate for state health care, the state gets to define what health care is.

According to that spurious bon mot of Chesterton’s, when men cease to believe in God, they do not believe in nothing; they believe in anything. But, in practice, the anything most of the West now believes in is government. As Tocqueville saw it, what prevents the ‘‘state popular’’ from declining into a ‘‘state despotic’’ is the strength of the intermediary institutions between the sovereign and the individual. But in the course of the 20th century, the intermediary institutions, the independent pillars of a free society, were gradually chopped away—from church to civic associations to family. Very little now stands between the individual and the sovereign, which is why the latter assumes the right to insert himself into every aspect of daily life, including the provisions a Catholic college president makes for his secretary’s IUD.

Seven years ago, George Weigel published a book called ‘‘The Cube and the Cathedral,’’ whose title contrasts two Parisian landmarks—the Cathedral of Notre Dame and the giant modernist cube of La Grande Arche de la Defe´nse, commissioned by President Mitterrand to mark the bicentenary of the French Revolution. As La Grande Arche boasts, the entire cathedral, including its spires and tower, would fit easily inside the cold geometry of Mitterrand’s cube. In Europe, the cube—the state—has swallowed the cathedral—the church. I’ve had conversations with a handful of senior EU officials in recent years in which all five casually deployed the phrase ‘‘post-Christian Europe’’ or ‘‘post-Christian future,’’ and meant both approvingly. These men hold that religious faith is incompatible with progressive society. Or as Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s control-freak spin doctor, once put it, cutting short the prime minister before he could answer an interviewer’s question about his religious faith: ‘‘We don’t do God.’’

For the moment, American politicians still do God, and indeed not being seen to do him remains something of a disadvantage on the national stage. But in private many Democrats agree with those ‘‘post-Christian’’ Europeans, and in public they legislate that way. Words matter, as then-senator Barack Obama informed us in 2008. And, as president, his choice of words has been revealing: He prefers, one notes, the formulation ‘‘freedom of worship’’ to ‘‘freedom of religion.’’

Example: ‘‘We’re a nation that guarantees the freedom to worship as one chooses.’’ (The president after the Fort Hood murders in 2009.) Er, no, ‘‘we’re a nation that guarantees’’ rather more than that. But Obama’s rhetorical sleight prefigured Commissar Sebelius’s edict, under which ‘‘religious liberty’’—i.e., the freedom to decline to facilitate condom dispensing, sterilization, and pharmacological abortion—is confined to those institutions engaged in religious instruction for card-carrying believers. This is a very Euro-secularist view of religion: It’s tolerated as a private members’ club for consenting adults. But don’t confuse ‘‘freedom to worship’’ for an hour or so on Sunday morning with any kind of license to carry on the rest of the week. You can be a practicing Godomite just so long as you don’t (per Mrs. Patrick Campbell) do it in the street and frighten the horses. The American bishops are not the most impressive body of men even if one discounts the explicitly Obamaphile rubes among them, and they have unwittingly endorsed this attenuated view of religious ‘‘liberty.’’ The Catholic Church is the oldest continuously operating entity in the Western world. The earliest recorded use of the brand first appears in Saint Ignatius’s letter to the Smyrnaeans of circa A.D. 110—that’s 1,902 years ago: ‘‘Wherever Jesus Christ is,’’ wrote Ignatius, ‘‘there is the Catholic Church,’’ a usage that suggests his readers were already familiar with the term. Obama’s ‘‘freedom to worship’’ inverts Ignatius: Wherever there is a Catholic church, there Jesus Christ is—in a quaint-looking building with a bit of choral music, a psalm or two, and a light homily on the need for ‘‘social justice’’ and action on ‘‘climate change.’’ The bishops plead, No, no, don’t forget our colleges and hospitals, too. In a garden of sexual Eden, the last guys not chowing down on once-forbidden fruits are the ones begging for the fig leaf. But neither is a definition of ‘‘religion’’ that Ignatius would have recognized. ‘‘Katholikos’’ means ‘‘universal’’: The Church cannot agree to the confines Obama wishes to impose and still be, in any sense, catholic.

If you think a Catholic owner of a sawmill or software business should be as free of state coercion as a Catholic college, the term ‘‘freedom of conscience’’ is more relevant than ‘‘freedom of religion.’’ For one thing, it makes it less easy for a secular media to present the issue as one of a recalcitrant institution out of step with popular progressivism. NPR dispatched its reporter Allison Keyes to a ‘typical’’ Catholic church in Washington, D.C., where she found congregants disinclined to follow their bishops. To a man (or, more often, woman), they disliked ‘‘the way the Church injects itself into political debates.’’ But, if contraceptives and abortion and conception and birth and chastity and fidelity and sexual morality are now ‘‘politics,’’ then what’s left for religion? Back in the late first century, Ignatius injected himself into enough ‘‘political debates’’ that he wound up getting eaten by lions at the Coliseum. But no doubt tut-tutting NPR listeners would have deplored the way the Church had injected itself into live theater. Ignatius’s successor bishops have opted for an ignobler end, agreeing to be nibbled to death by Leviathan. Even in their objections to the Obama administration, the bishops endorse the state’s view of the church—as something separate and segregated from society, albeit ever more nominally. At the airport recently, I fell into conversation with a lady whose employer, a Catholic college, had paid for her to get her tubes tied. Why not accept that this is just one of those areas where one has to render under Caesar? Especially when Caesar sees ‘‘health care’’ as a state-funded toga party. But once government starts (in Commissar Sebelius’s phrase) ‘‘striking a balance,’’ it never stops. What’s next? How about a religious test for public office? In the old days, England’s Test Acts required holders of office to forswear Catholic teaching on matters such as transubstantiation and the invocation of saints. Today in the European Union holders of office are required to forswear Catholic teaching on more pressing matters such as abortion and homosexuality.

Rocco Buttiglione’s views on these subjects would have been utterly unremarkable for an Italian Catholic of half a century ago. By 2004, they were enough to render him ineligible to serve as a European commissioner. To the college of Eurocardinals, a man such as Signor Buttiglione can have no place in public life. The Catholic hierarchy’s fawning indulgence of the Beltway’s abortion zealots and serial annullers is not reciprocated: The Church of Government punishes apostasy ever more zealously. The state no longer criminalizes a belief in transubstantiation, mainly because most people have no idea what that is. But they know what sex is, and, if the price of Pierre Trudeau’s assertion that ‘‘the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation’’ is that the state has to take an ever larger place in the churches and colleges and hospitals and insurance agencies and small businesses of the nation, they’re cool with that. The developed world’s massive expansion of sexual liberty has provided a useful cover for the shriveling of almost every other kind. Free speech, property rights, economic liberty, and the right to self-defense are under continuous assault by Big Government. In New York and California and many other places, sexual license is about the only thing you don’t need a license for. Even if you profoundly disagree with Pope Paul VI’s predictions that artificial birth control would lead to ‘‘conjugal infidelity and the general lowering of morality,’’ the objectification of women, and governments’ ‘‘imposing upon their peoples’’ state-approved methods of contraception, or even if you think he was pretty much on the money but that the collective damage they have done does not outweigh the individual freedom they have brought to many, it ought to bother you that in the cause of delegitimizing two millennia of moral teaching the state is willing to intrude on core rights—rights to property, rights of association, even rights to private conversation. In 2009, David Booker was suspended from his job at a hostel for the homeless run by the Church of England’s Society of St James after a late-night chit-chat with a colleague, Fiona Vardy, in which he chanced to mention that he did not believe that vicars should be allowed to wed their gay partners. Miss Vardy raised no objection at the time, but the following day mentioned the private conversation to her superiors. They recognized the gravity of the situation and acted immediately, suspending Mr. Booker from his job and announcing that ‘‘action has been taken to safeguard both residents and staff.’’ If you let private citizens run around engaging in free exercise of religion in private conversation, there’s no telling where it might end.

And so the peoples of the West are enlightened enough to have cast off the stultifying oppressiveness of religion for a world in which the state regulates every aspect of life. In 1944, at a terrible moment of the most terrible century, Henri de Lubac wrote a reflection on Europe’s civilizational crisis, Le drame de l’humanisme athe´e. By ‘‘atheistic humanism,’’ he meant the organized rejection of God—not the freelance atheism of individual skeptics but atheism as an ideology and political project in its own right. As M. de Lubac wrote, ‘‘It is not true, as is sometimes said, that man cannot organize the world without God. What is true is that, without God, he can only organize it against man.’’ ‘‘Atheistic humanism’’ became inhumanism in the hands of the Nazis and Communists and, in its less malign form in today’s European Union, a kind of dehumanism in which a present-tense culture amuses itself to extinction. ‘‘Post-Christian Europe’’ is a bubble of 50-year-old retirees, 30-year-old students, empty maternity wards . . . and a surging successor population already restive to move beyond its Muslim ghettoes.

Already, Islam commands more respect in the public square. In Britain, police sniffer dogs wear booties to search the homes of suspected Muslim terrorists. Government health care? The Scottish NHS enjoined its employees not to be seen eating in their offices during Ramadan. In the United Kingdom’s disease-ridden hospitals, staff were told to wear short sleeves in the interests of better hygiene. Muslim nurses said this was disrespectful and were granted leave to retain their long sleeves as long as they rolled them up and scrubbed carefully. But mandatory scrubbing is also disrespectful on the grounds that it requires women to bare their arms. So the bureaucracy mulled it over and issued them with disposable over-sleeves. A deference to conscience survives, at least for certain approved identity groups. The irrationalism of the hyper-rational state ought by now to be evident in everything from the euro-zone crisis to the latest CBO projections: The paradox of the Church of Big Government is that it weans people away from both the conventional family impulse and the traditional transcendent purpose necessary to sustain it. So what is the future of the American Catholic Church if it accepts the straitjacket of Obama’s ‘‘freedom to worship’’? North of the border, motoring around the once-Catholic bastion of Quebec, you’ll pass every couple of miles one of the province’s many, many churches, and invariably out front you’ll see a prominent billboard bearing the slogan ‘‘Notre patrimoine religieux—c’est sacre´!’’ ‘‘Our religious heritage—it’s sacred!’’ Which translated from the statist code-speak means: ‘‘Our religious heritage—it’s over!’’ But it’s left every Quebec community with a lot of big, prominently positioned buildings, and not all of them can be, as Montreal’s Saint-Jean de la Croix and Couvent de Marie Re´paratrice were, converted into luxury three-quarter-million-dollar condos. So to prevent them from decaying into downtown eyesores, there’s a government-funded program to preserve them as spiffy-looking husks. The Obama administration’s ‘‘freedom to worship’’ leads to the same soulless destination: a church whose moral teachings must be first subordinated to the caprices of the hyper-regulatory Leviathan, and then, as on the Continent, rendered incompatible with public office, and finally, as in that Southampton homeless shelter, hounded even from private utterance. This is the world the ‘‘social justice’’ bishops have made. What’s left are hymns and stained glass, and then in the emptiness, the mere echo:

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round

earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing

roar . . .

From scrubbing floors to Ivy League: Homeless student to go to dream college By Vivian Kuo, CNN updated 9:14 AM EDT, Fri June 8, 2012 From homeless to Harvard STORY HIGHLIGHTS

Dawn Loggins, 18, was abandoned last year and left homeless

Staff at Burns High School in North Carolina chipped in to help

Dawn applied to 5 colleges and was accepted to each, including her dream school

Dawn worked as school janitor between her studies to make ends meet

Lawndale, North Carolina (CNN) -- It's before sunrise, and the janitor at Burns High School has already been down the length of a hallway, cleaning and sweeping classrooms before the day begins. This particular janitor is painstakingly methodical, even as she administers a mental quiz on an upcoming test. Her name is Dawn Loggins, a straight-A senior at the very school she cleans. On this day, she maneuvers a long-handled push broom between rows of desks. She stops to pick up a hardened, chewed piece of gum. "This annoys me, because there's a trash can right here," she says. The worst, she says, is snuff cans in urinals. "It's just rude and pointless." With her long, straight dark blonde hair and black-rimmed glasses, Dawn looks a bit like Avril Lavigne. But her life is a far cry from that of a privileged pop star. She was homeless at the start of the school year, abandoned by her drug-abusing parents. The teachers and others in town pitched in -- donating clothes and providing medical and dental care. She got the janitorial job through a school workforce assistance program. She's grateful for the work. But it's where she's going next, beyond the walls of Burns, that excites her most. She applied to four colleges within North Carolina and one dream university. She'll graduate soon before heading off, leaving her dust pan behind.

Dawn Loggins is working as a janitor to make ends meet.

For now, there's still work to be done. She stops for a quick bite to eat in the custodial closet amid Pine-Sol and Clorox. She then darts to classes -- three advanced placement courses and an honors class. Overheard on CNN.com: Teen janitor's story 'like Good Will Hunting,' readers say Growing up without electricity Dawn grew up in a ramshackle home with no electricity and no running water. She often went days, even weeks without showering. She and her brother Shane -- who was equally studious in his schoolwork -- would walk 20 minutes to a public park to fetch water. "We would get water jugs and fill them up at the park, using the spigots in the bathroom. And we would use that to flush the toilet or cook with. Stuff like that," she says. She confided in a staff member at school. She had trouble doing homework at nighttime because her home had no electricity and she couldn't afford candles. It was difficult to read in the dark. "OK, we'll get you some candles. We'll take care of that," said Junie Barrett, Dawn's supervisor. Another time, Barrett says, Dawn and her brother asked if they could use the school's washing machine to clean their clothes. "I said, 'Just leave them with me. We'll get them washed, dried,' " Barrett recalls. "We let them use our shower facilities in the locker rooms because they had no running water. They had nothing to bathe in."

Burns High was their fourth high school since middle school, as they moved from town to town. Living the life of a rolling stone, the two had missed several months' worth of classwork when they first arrived two years ago, putting them well behind other students' progress. Shane was outgoing, but Dawn always appeared more reserved. Guidance counselor Robyn Putnam saw the potential in Dawn and Shane early on and enrolled them in online classes to get them caught up. The work paid off.

Abandoned by parents

Last summer, Dawn was invited to attend a prestigious six-week residential summer program, the Governor's School of North Carolina, at Meredith College in Raleigh, 200 miles east of Lawndale, to study natural science. It was a field Dawn had never studied before. The program is reserved for the state's top students. Putnam ferried Dawn to Raleigh to attend the elite program and took her shopping, making sure she had the clothes she needed. Other faculty members contributed funds, too. Putnam worried Dawn's home situation could worsen while she was away. "We weren't even sure where her parents were at that time. And there was an eviction notice on the house," she says. "We kept telling her to get everything she could; we knew this was a possibility." Dawn saw her parents for 30 minutes during the middle of the summer program during a short break. They talked about her school and how she was doing. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. "It was just a regular conversation," she says. She wouldn't hear from them again for weeks. As she prepared to leave the summer program, she kept calling her parents' phone, only to learn it had been disconnected. Putnam picked her up and brought her back to Lawndale. "When I returned, my grandmother had been dropped off at a local homeless shelter, my brother had just left, and my parents had just gone," she says. "I found out later they had moved to Tennessee." Her voice is steady, matter of fact. "I never expected my parents to just, like, leave." Dawn was abandoned. "I'm not mad at my parents. My mom and my stepdad both think that they did what was best for me," she says.

Dawn Loggins maintained an A-average despite her hardships. In fact, she used her parents' example to drive her. "I just realize that they have their own problems that they need to work through," she says. "They do love me; I know they love me. They just don't show it in a way that most people would see as normal."

Stability in Lawndale

For a while, Dawn lived on the odd couch at friends' homes, while she figured out what to do. Sometimes, she slept on the floor. The only thing that was clear was that she wanted to stay in Lawndale, where she was active in extracurricular activities, had a boyfriend and had a job. Her classmates there didn't make fun of her, though she had been mercilessly mocked in middle school. "It was the worst. That's when I would come home crying because the teasing was so bad," Dawn recalled.

Helping Dawn

For those wanting to help, Dawn appreciates the generosity. She wants to use funds to form a nonprofit organization to help other homeless children. Any contributions can be sent to: Burns High School/Dawn Loggins Fund, 307 East Stagecoach Trail, Lawndale, NC 28090

She had lived with her grandmother until she was 12 and attended junior high at a school about an hour away from Lawndale during that time. "My grandma loved me, and she taught me a lot. She had lots of crafts around and watched History Channel with us. But ..." Dawn's voice halts, then begins again a few seconds later. "She never really explained to me and my brother the importance of bathing regularly. And our house was really disgusting. We had cockroaches everywhere. And we had trash piled literally 2 feet high. We'd have to step over it to get anywhere in the house." Dawn would go without showering two to three months at a time and wear the same dress to school for weeks straight. "When I was little, it seemed normal to me. I didn't realize that other families weren't living the same way that I was. And because of that I got teased, the kids would call me dirty." In Lawndale, a town of about 600 in the Appalachian foothills of western North Carolina, things were different. Dawn felt comfortable. With her parents gone, she processed the options with her guidance counselor. She could move yet again to Tennessee to be with her mother, or she could be turned over to the Department of Social Services. Putnam feared what that might bring. "If Dawn were to go into the system, she could be uprooted again and moved around," she says.

Dawn would turn 18 during the second semester, Putnam knew, making her an adult by law. So Putnam asked Dawn: "What do you want to do? She said, 'I want to graduate from Burns. To be in the same school two years.' " So the community and Burns staff became her family. Sheryl Kolton, a custodian and bus driver for Burns Middle School, had met Dawn before and knew her but not well. She wasn't expecting the phone call she received. "The counselor at the high school just called me one day and asked me if Dawn could come live here," Kolton says. A few days later, she and her husband, Norm, agreed.

Shooting for the stars

With a roof over her head and the contributions of Burns staff to supplement the Koltons' income needed to house and feed a growing teenager, Dawn was seemingly in a stable environment. She admits that having her parents out of the picture helped. "Honestly it was kind of a relief," she says. "I mean, I have a place to stay, and I have a job, and I'm going to school." As she began her senior year, Dawn turned her laser-beam focus to her future: college. She knew she wanted a different path than her parents. "When I was younger, I was able to look at all the bad choices -- at the neglect, and the drug abuse, and everything that was happening -- and make a decision for myself that I was not going to end up like my parents, living from paycheck to paycheck." A straight-A student, Dawn was president of the photography club. She also had started a community service program collecting thousands of letters for active military troops and was involved in National Honor Society and band club. Before she took her custodian job, she ran cross country. She wasn't top of her class, and she didn't have a perfect GPA, but she was smart. On paper, she had always fared well. "I was looking at her transcript, and one of the lowest grades on her transcript is a 94 and that was for a class called Success 101, and the irony of that is just really amazing," Putnam says with a laugh.

Dawn Loggins says the worst thing about cleaning is snuff cans in urinals.

Dawn applied to four colleges within the state: the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; North Carolina State University; Davidson College; and Warren Wilson College. In December, she sent one final application off in the mail, to her reach-for-the-stars choice, Harvard. No one from Burns High had been accepted to the elite Ivy League school. "I thought about it and just figured, 'Why not?' " She asked her history teacher, Larry Gardner, for a recommendation letter. "I don't know how many times I started that letter of recommendation," he recalls. "Because how do you articulate her story into two pages? How do you explain this is a young lady who deserves a chance but hasn't had the opportunities?" But after a prayer for wisdom, the words flowed. "Once again, words fail me as I attempt to write this letter of recommendation," Gardner began. "I can promise I've never written one like this before and will probably not write one like this again. Because most students who face challenges that are not even remotely as difficult as Dawn's give up. This young lady has, unlike most of us, known hunger. She's known abuse and neglect, she's known homelessness and filth. Yet she's risen above it all to become such an outstanding young lady."

Months passed. She was accepted to the four schools in North Carolina. Each time, the acceptance letter came as part of a thick package with fat brochures and congratulatory notes. Days went by. Nothing from Harvard. But on a sunny day earlier this year, she came inside after tending the garden. There was a letter from Harvard, the type of letter every high school senior dreads from a university -- a regular-sized envelope, the ominous sign of rejection. Cautiously, she opened it: "Dear Ms. Loggins, I'm delighted to report that the admissions committee has asked me to inform you that you will be admitted to the Harvard College class of 2016. ... We send such an early positive indication only to outstanding applicants ..." She gasped when she read those words. Gardner had the same reaction when she handed him the note at school the next day. "I just looked up at her, and kind of teared up because this is a young lady who ... " he stops, his voice breaking. "When I first met her and had her brother in class, they were living in a home without electricity, without running water, they were showering at a local park in a restroom after most of the people at the park had left. This is a young lady who's been through so much and for her to receive this letter -- pretty awesome." Not only was Dawn accepted to Harvard, she got a full ride. She was offered tuition, room and board, as well as assistance finding an on-campus job. The tiny town of Lawndale rallied around Dawn again. They raised money to get her to Boston so she could see the school in person in April. "We in a sense had a collective responsibility to get her to Harvard," says Aaron Allen, Burns High principal. "Even though Harvard was going to pay for Dawn to go on her own, this is a girl who's had multiple moves, never flown, never ridden a subway, never really been outside small town USA, North Carolina foothills, and you're expecting her to go to Cambridge all by herself?" Barrett, her custodial supervisor, traveled to Cambridge with her. "When we went up there, it was just like she was at home. She will succeed, and she will excel." For Dawn, it wasn't a foregone conclusion that she would attend, but her inaugural visit solidified the decision. "I just could not picture myself anywhere else, at any other college."

Helping others

Since Dawn's story has come out, she's attracted attention worldwide from well-wishers sending her everything from simple encouragement to monetary donations. Dawn doesn't want the money. "When I get to college, I can work for what I need. And I know my future is going to be great." She hopes to start a nonprofit organization to help other teens who've had obstacles in their educations, using the funds that have been sent to her. There are more than 200 students listed as homeless in Cleveland County, where Lawndale is located. "There are so many kids whose futures aren't so sure, and they need help more than I do," she says. "I want them to be able to use my story as motivation. And I want the general public to realize that there are so many kids who need help." The final pages of Dawn's high school chapter are nearing a close. She will walk across the stage today -- June 7 -- to accept her diploma. She has invited her parents but isn't sure they will be able to attend. "If they're not there, it would be for good reason."

But the one person she will look for in the crowd is her brother Shane. "Throughout the years, no matter where I've been or been through, he's always been there for me," she says, with a rare ghost of a smile. Shane will attend Berea College in Kentucky on a scholarship. Dawn has learned the sort of lessons that can't be learned in school. "I love my parents. I disagree with the choices that they've made. But we all have to live with the consequences of our actions," she said. She takes it all in stride. "If I had not had those experiences, I wouldn't be such a strong-willed or determined person." She might just find Harvard to be easy.

Korean Men Use Brokers to Find Brides in Vietnam

Norimitsu Onishi/The New York Times
From left, Bui Thi Thuy and Kim Tae-goo and To Thi Vien and Kim Wan-su prepared for weddings in Vietnam and life in South Korea. More Photos >


HANOI, Vietnam — It was midnight here in Hanoi, or already 2 a.m. back in Seoul, South Korea. But after a five-hour flight on a recent Sunday, Kim Wan-su was driven straight from the airport to the Lucky Star karaoke bar here, where 23 young Vietnamese women seeking Korean husbands sat waiting in two dimly lighted rooms.

“Do I have to look at them and decide now?” Mr. Kim asked, as the marriage brokers gave a brief description of each of the women sitting around a U-shaped sofa.
Thus, Mr. Kim, a 39-year-old auto parts worker from a suburb of Seoul, began the mildly chaotic, two-hour process of choosing a spouse. In a day or two, if his five-day marriage tour went according to plan, he would be wed and enjoying his honeymoon at the famed Perfume Pagoda on the Huong Tich Mountain southwest of here.
More and more South Korean men are finding wives outside of South Korea, where a surplus of bachelors, a lack of marriageable Korean partners and the rising social status of women have combined to shrink the domestic market for the marriage-minded male. Bachelors in China, India and other Asian nations, where the traditional preference for sons has created a disproportionate number of men now fighting over a smaller pool of women, are facing the same problem.
The rising status of women in the United States sent American men who were searching for more traditional wives to Russia in the 1990s. But the United States’ more balanced population has not led to the shortage of potential brides and the thriving international marriage industry found in South Korea.
Now, that industry is seizing on an increasingly globalized marriage market and sending comparatively affluent Korean bachelors searching for brides in the poorer corners of China and Southeast and Central Asia. The marriage tours are fueling an explosive growth in marriages to foreigners in South Korea, a country whose ethnic homogeneity lies at the core of its self-identity.
In 2005, marriages to foreigners accounted for 14 percent of all marriages in South Korea, up from 4 percent in 2000.
South Korean news organizations have reported that many of the foreign brides were initially lied to by their husbands, and suffered isolation and sometimes abuse in South Korea. Partly in response, the Ministry of Health and Welfare is now moving to regulate the international marriage industry, which emerged so suddenly that the Consumer Protection Board can only estimate that there are 2,000 to 3,000 such agencies nationwide.
After an initial setback — his first three choices found various reasons to decline his offer — Mr. Kim narrowed his field to a 22-year-old college student and an 18-year-old high school graduate.
“What’s your personality like?” Mr. Kim asked the college student.
“I’m an extrovert,” she said.
The 18-year-old asked why he wanted to marry a Vietnamese woman.
“I have two colleagues who married Vietnamese women,” he said, adding, “The women seem devoted and family-oriented.”
One Korean broker said the 22-year-old, who seemed bright and assertive, would adapt well to South Korea. Another suggested flipping a coin.
“Well, since I’m quiet, I’ll choose the extrovert,” Mr. Kim said finally, adding quickly, “Is it O.K. if I hold her hand now?”
She went over to sit next to him, though neither dared to hold hands. She spelled out her name in her left palm: Vien. Her name was To Thi Vien.
In South Korea, billboards advertising marriages to foreigners dot the countryside, and fliers are scattered on the Seoul subway. Many rural governments, faced with declining populations, subsidize the marriage tours, which typically cost $10,000.
The business began in the late 1990s by matching South Korean farmers or the physically disabled mostly to ethnic Koreans in China, according to brokers and the Consumer Protection Board. But by 2003, the majority of customers were urban bachelors, and the foreign brides came from a host of countries.
The widespread availability of sex-screening technology for pregnant women since the 1980s has resulted in the birth of a disproportionate number of South Korean males. What is more, South Korea’s growing wealth has increased women’s educational and employment opportunities, even as it has led to rising divorce rates and plummeting birthrates.
“Nowadays, Korean women have higher standards,” said Lee Eun-tae, the owner of Interwedding, an agency that last year matched 400 Korean bachelors with brides from Vietnam, China, the Philippines, Mongolia, Thailand, Cambodia, Uzbekistan and Indonesia. “If a man has only a high school degree, or lives with his mother, or works only at a small- or medium-size company, or is short or older, or lives in the countryside, he’ll find it very difficult to marry in Korea.”
Critics say the business demeans and takes advantage of poor women. But brokers say they are merely matching the needs of Korean men and foreign women seeking better lives.
“But this business will get more difficult as those countries get richer,” said Won Hyun-jae, the owner of i-Bombit, another agency. “Now, even a disabled Korean man can find a Vietnamese bride. But eventually Vietnamese women will ask why they have to go marry a Korean man when life in Vietnam is good.”
For now, Vietnam remains a popular source of brides, second only to China. Marriages with Vietnamese women are considered so successful that the local government of at least one city, Yeongcheon, in South Korea’s rural southeast, subsidizes marriage tours only to Vietnam.
At Incheon International Airport to the west of Seoul, an increasingly familiar scene unfolds in front of the arrival gates in the mornings. Korean men, holding telltale bouquets and often accompanied by relatives, greet their Vietnamese brides as they arrive on overnight flights from Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City.
On the Marriage Tour
It was also at the airport that a tense-looking Mr. Kim and another client began their marriage tours. Three brokers for Interwedding and i-Bombit arrived.
Mr. Kim, urged on by an older sister, decided to go to Vietnam after a last-ditch effort to meet a Korean woman in December failed. A high school graduate, he lives with his mother and his sister, and he works on the assembly line of a small manufacturer of car keys. Though he lives in one of the world’s most wired societies, Mr. Kim does not use the Internet.
The other client was Kim Tae-goo, 51, who grows ginseng and apples on the 2.5 acres of land he owns in Yeongju, a town southeast of Seoul. Mr. Kim had recently divorced a Chinese woman he married after the death of his first wife, a Korean woman. He lives with his 16-year-old daughter and his elderly mother. His 21-year-old has left home.
Ahn Jae-won, a Korean broker who has long been based in Hanoi and is married to a Vietnamese woman, began: “The women have come out looking their best for you. But don’t expect them to look as pretty as Korean women. There is a big gap in our G.D.P.’s. Don’t be condescending. Don’t lie. If you lie, they’ll find out eventually and feel betrayed and run away.
“The parents know that their daughters will marry a Korean man. The authorities know this is happening, but there’ll be trouble if we do it in front of them. So I seek your understanding. Once we land in Hanoi, even though it’ll be very late, we’ll go meet the women right away. It’s safer to do this at night.
“One last thing. Other companies allow you to sleep with the women on the first night. We don’t. Only on the bridal night. We must, after all, keep our decorum as Korean men. Is that O.K. with you?”
The two nodded.
Introductions and a Choice
And so, at the Lucky Star karaoke bar here, the older Mr. Kim addressed the Vietnamese women, most in their early 20s.
“My 16-year-old daughter lives with me, and I’m a farmer,” he said, after informing the women through the brokers that he would also send $100 a month to their parents in Vietnam. “Is that O.K. with you?”
“I know how to farm,” said Bui Thi Thuy, 22, one of the two women Mr. Kim eventually focused on.
Asked whether she had any questions, Ms. Thuy said she had none. But the other woman, an earnest 28-year-old in a light-green jacket, asked, “If I marry you, will you love me and take care of me forever?”
“Of course,” Mr. Kim answered, then quickly settled on Ms. Thuy.
After a few hours’ sleep, the new couples and the brokers squeezed into a small van for the four-hour ride to the women’s home province, Quang Ninh, about four hours east of Hanoi. There, the couples would be interviewed by the local authorities before registering for their marriages.
The road out of Hanoi, a wide highway flanked by new factories owned by multinationals like Canon, eventually narrowed to two lanes crisscrossed frequently by cows. Farther out, farmers could be seen working the soil by hand, and signs of Vietnam’s booming economy grew fewer.
Most of the Vietnamese women marrying Korean men came from the rural areas around Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.
Both Ms. Vien and Ms. Thuy had friends who had married Korean men and lived, happily it seemed, in South Korea. Like many Vietnamese, they were also avid fans of Korean television shows and movies, the so-called Korean Wave of pop culture that has swept all of Asia since the late 1990s.
The Korean Wave
The Korean Wave has transformed South Korea’s image in the region, presenting the country as having successfully balanced tradition and modernity, a place that produces coveted Samsung cellphones and cherishes family ties.
The week the two women met their future husbands, Vietnamese television was showing in prime time a South Korean television series called “Successful Story of a Bright Girl” — the story of a simple country girl who goes to Seoul and captures the heart of a tycoon.
“To be honest, I don’t know much about Korea except what I’ve seen on television,” Ms. Vien said. “But the Korean landscape is beautiful. Korean men look sophisticated and affectionate. They seem responsible, and they live in harmony with their family members and their colleagues.”
A soccer fan able to rattle off the jersey numbers of David Beckham and Zinedine Zidane, she had registered two years earlier with a broker for marriages with Koreans. Her father, a construction worker for a local firm, was able to send his two children — Ms. Vien and her older brother — to college.
By contrast, Ms. Thuy was one of five children of rice farmers. She had registered with the agency soon after graduating from high school.
“A friend of mine married a Korean man and now lives in Seoul,” Ms. Thuy said. “We talk on the phone sometimes. She’s very happy. She says there are so many people and tall buildings in Seoul.”
At age 22, she said, half of her peers had already married. As she waited to marry, she helped with household chores, forbidden by her parents to engage in the farm work that might blemish her looks.
The couples registered for their marriages and underwent medical checkups, running into other Vietnamese-Korean couples along the way.
The younger Mr. Kim wrote a letter in Korean to his bride — trying to allay the anxieties he saw on her face, promising to protect her and surmount the inevitable problems — but found no way to relay its meaning. The couples bought Korean and Vietnamese dictionaries, pointing to words or using broken English.
The In-Laws
About 40 hours after landing here in Hanoi, the Korean men married their Vietnamese brides in a double ceremony. The brides’ relatives waited at a large restaurant here with expectant looks.
“Today is the union not only of two people, but of two countries,” said Ms. Vien’s father, To Minh Seu, 55. “Vietnam and Korea share many similarities. We are both Confucian societies.”
Standing next to her daughter and her new son-in-law, Ms. Thuy’s mother, Nguyen Thi Nguyet, 56, said: “This is a poor country, but conditions are much better in Korea. I hope my daughter will have a better life there.”
But Ms. Thuy’s father, Bui Van Vui, 52, was displeased that his daughter was marrying a man just one year younger than he was. The night before, he had telephoned Mr. Ahn to complain about the age gap between his daughter and Mr. Kim.
“I’m still very worried because of the age gap,” he said as his son-in-law listened to Mr. Ahn’s interpretation. “I’m slightly relieved now that I see my son-in-law for the first time. But I can’t stop worrying.”
“Don’t worry, don’t worry about a thing,” Mr. Kim said.
Still, the father looked grim throughout the ceremony.
“Let’s tell him about the compensation,” Mr. Kim told Mr. Ahn, referring to the $100 he would send every month.
“Later, later,” Mr. Ahn said.
As he left the restaurant after the ceremony, the father turned around at the entrance to take a final look at his daughter. He pressed two fingers against his lips and kissed her goodbye.
Later, Ms. Thuy said: “I was my father’s favorite. He really adores me and is worried.”
She, too, was worried. “I know Korea only from television, but it must be very, very different from reality. I don’t know whether my new family will like me, and I don’t know how I’ll adapt. I’m overwhelmed with worries.”
A New Chapter Begins
Two days later, it was time for the Korean men to return home, with their wives staying behind to complete the paperwork to join them.
At the airport here, Ms. Thuy announced that she had something to tell her husband and asked Mr. Ahn to interpret.
“Please extend my greetings to your mother and children,” she said.
Mr. Kim reached out for a handshake, but the brokers pressed him to give his wife a hug.
“Don’t worry about me,” she said. “I’ll study Korean very hard, and by the time you see me I’ll be good at it. We had only a short time together. But I felt affection between us and started to feel love for you. When you’re in Korea, please call me.”
“I’ll call you in two days,” he said.
The two women would leave Hanoi in three months, the same way half a dozen other Vietnamese brides, visas in hand, did on a recent night. The extended families of these brides had come from the countryside to bid them farewell, some still wearing car sickness patches behind their ears for the long drive here.
Many, it seemed, were visiting the airport for the first time. Some kept riding an escalator up and down, their faces showing the thrill of a new experience.
Then, with the boarding time approaching, they clustered in front of a window looking into the immigration office, noses pressed against the glass, and waved at the brides as they were stamped out of Vietnam and went off to catch the red-eye to South Korea.

Su-hyun Lee contributed reporting.