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Posted On
11/20/2008

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17 Comments »

eHarmony Forced to Create a Gay Dating Service

eHarmony, the highly successful online dating service has settled with the New Jersey courts and is now required to offer a new business model that caters to homosexual daters.  Two issues here:  First, the issue isn’t just about the gay community.  Does it mean that if you open a niche business to African-Americans you have to include Asians and Hispanics?  Is this the complete end of individualism in America? Have we lost the positive attributes of indentity?  This has enormous implications for religious organizations who focus on particular groups.  And second - as a country, we seem to be moving away from “innovation” to “entitlement.”  In this case, rather than someone realizing the opportunity for a gay dating service and starting a business focused on that group, they sue to get others to do it for them.  That’s a huge mental block to originality and innovation – particularly during such a challenging financial time in this country.

Am I making too much of this?  Or does it appear that we’ve crossed a line here?  A business is forced to spend money to create an alternative model that appeals to the homosexual community?  I think the word “required” is the key here.  After all, this isn’t a government agency, but a private business.  Isn’t this a freedom issue?  Big brother marches on…

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 20th, 2008 at 9:30 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • BC

    I was wondering.  If i decided to open up a fast food restaurant that serves chicken…nuthin but chicken…because that's what i do…and alot of folks like it and i'm making a good living at it…but then a person who doesn't like chicken and really likes beef comes and asks me to start serving beef…would i be forced to offer beef?

    I truly don't get WHY they are made to offer an alternative.  Why can't the other person just go somewhere else?  Should I go into an establishment that sells women's clothes and demand that they start selling men's clothes just because i'm there?

    I must be looking at this all together wrong…

     

  • http://www.todayswalk.org Dave Kalahar

    Month to month, week to week, and day by day now, this country is becoming all about "entitlement".  I'm seeing it in our church now. I'm fighting to keep my teenage daughter from buying into it.  I'm sad. The line has been crossed for a while. 

  • freethinker

    Could you explain a little more about what you are seeing in your church regarding "entitlement" that's being a problem with your daughter?  What is your church doing and why don't you leave?

  • Robert

    Here's Michelle Malkin's report on the issue. She's got a lot of the details:

    http://michellemalkin.com/2008/11/21/eharmony-and-the-tolerance-mau-mau-ers/

  • http://www.craigforrest.com Craig Forrest

    My wife, Rebecca, and I met on eHarmony and we are coming up on 5 years of marriage. Best $99 I've ever spent in my life. My brother Paul met his wife, Kim, on the same site later. These series of events are truly sad as the line between "innovation and entitlement" has at least blurred and perhaps even been moved (or slowly erased).

    As commentary – My 23 yr old son has chosen a gay lifestyle. A few years ago, in high school, the library had blocked the common email ISPs like yahoo, hotmail, aol etc. so that students wouldn't use the library computers to write emails. However, the computers did not have gay.com blocked. So my son was able to log on and surf gay comments and articles to his heart & mind's content on the school computers. It took considerable pressure on the high school leadership to get gay.com blocked as well.

    Only when a lawsuit was threatened by parents did the high school cave in. Sad. But in some ways not surprising.

  • http://petersmythe.org Peter Smythe

    Phil, I am not sure that the allusion to Big Brother holds.  For decades, it has been unlawful for businesses and even home-sellers to discriminate on the basis of race.  Consequently, eHarmony could not create a white-only dating service and argue that someone else could create an African-American dating service if he wanted to.  American Christians (at least most of them) haven't had a problem with the racial prohibitions because it jives with their basic beliefs.  

    The issue with eHarmony is that it wants to operate as a church, without being a church, in the business marketplace.    

  • http://alexkalmar.com Alex

    This has absolutely nothing to do with the demographic that eHarmony has chosen to serve. Why should someone tell them who they are going to advertise to? (…or in other terms, provide service to) I don't know how to word it, but it just doesn't make sense logically.

     The Chicken restaurant serving Beef example is a good one!

  • Ken Stewart

    First of all, this was a settlement, not a legal judgment.  That is a BIG difference! To say that it was forced upon them is not exactly the truth. 

    I'm not saying that Warren should've fought the lawsuit, but they certainly could have.  

     

     

  • Phil

    That's another conversation completely.  It would have cost millions in legal fees to fight, so they chose the alternative.  One of these days we should discuss a culture where it costs too much to defend ourselves…

  • Ken Stewart

    Certainly hiring Ted Olson (former U.S. Solicitor General) to represent you is not an 'inexpensive' proposition, but he certainly would have done a 'bang up' job given the opportunity to fight the lawsuit.  

  • Mike

    eHarmony should have chosen to not offer their services to the people of New Jersey instead of given in to something that obviously goes against the company's beliefs.

  • CVH

    Mike,

    Good idea but I'm sure then they'd be sued by someone from New Jersey who would claim discrimination based on where they live, a kind of web-based 'redlining'.

    What concerns me is that companies are being forced to settle lawsuits like this, either because the cost of fighting them through to an uncertain outcome is cost-prohibitive, or because they see further potential lawsuits down the road, so why not 'get it out of the way' now and hopefully end up with a more palatable outcome than a future lawsuit may result in.

    With the rise of gay rights activism in the culture, I'm sure more businesses and ministries will have to face situations they wouldn't have envisioned in the past. If civil rights include race and religion in our brave new world, doesn't it follow that sexual orientation will follow? And while we want to engage the culture and have positive relationships with people of any sexual orientation, the bottom line is legal decisions are being made based on a morality that is civil, not Biblical.

    What I don't understand about the law or civil rights legislation is how it can be interpreted in cases such as this to create, in effect, a double-standard. Are we back to 'separate but equal'? And what if the case involved a smaller company? If they were forced to settle a case in such a manner, could they then sue the state for the cost of creating another product (or website), especially if doing so might bankrupt the company?

    The principles of 'rights' and 'entitlement' are worthy when held up to the light of common sense and truth. The problem, increasingly, is that the ones who are making the judgments of what is a 'right', what is common sense and, ultimately, what is truth, hold values that are diametrically opposed to those of people of faith.

  • Mary Hutchinson

    This company had the money to fight it.  They were within their rights as a private company, but they caved.

    That is the scary part…that people are just giving up without a fight,

  • Jeff Reid

    Amen to that! What do we have to do? We have to keep the conversation going… that it's just plain wrong! Does God love the adulterer? of course he does. BUT, They weren't born that way, right?! We need compelling ad campaigns that say just that ~ the sexual obsession of the gay lifestyle is in no way different than the sexually obsession and emotional connection of someone who's having an affair. But we don't fight for their rights, too, do we? No one could never sue eHarmony, successfully, for not catering to those who'd like to become mistresses. We simply have to teach our children to resist thoughts that are impure, the same way we, as adults, would resist desires for adultery.

  • Phil

    Keep in mind, this has drug on in the courts for four years.  The legal costs have been enormous up to this point.

  • freethinker

    So sad about E-Harmony…I met my Christian wife there when it was just starting and was only advertising on Christian media outlets.  Forget E-Harmony and go back to the singles' groups… I guess…??? What about its founder Dr. Warren?  Is he still in charge?  If he's a Christian, then, is he compromising for the sake of his company?  What is he going to answer to God when he dies…?

  • http://www.frontgatemedia.com Scott Shuford

    We're only going to see more of these kinds of issues as Christians. Personally, I think they should have defended this, but I'm not in their shoes. They could have rec'd help from various areas to fight this. eHarmony if a for profit biz and not a ministry, so that is also an issue.

    If this is the route eHarmony "has" to go(based on either cost to defend or court sanctioned verdict) then there is lemonade to be made.

    Someone is going to make $$ from this community, so if eHarmony is "forced" to participate there, then make it the best it can be and start a relationship with that community. Look for ways to make use of it, like donating the profits to homosexual recovery counseling. I wouldn't suggest creating a porn site in order to harvest $$ like that, but if you are "stuck" doing so then do it to the glory of God. (I realize how messy a statement that is.)

    Alternatively, it may be less costly to create the new initiative and see if fail. I just think they are opening themselves up to being sued again for on some other issue in this process.

    It's certainly another testimonial to the loss of our justice system in favor of a mere legal system. As Christians, we have to do a better job of utlizing the legal system the way our opponents do. Do "we" now sue a handfull of the leading gay sites and make them settle or defend the case and have to create Christian sites? It's a messy world out there.

    Because it applies here, I want to recommend that you check out the biggest Christian ministries dealing with issues like these: Alliance Defense Fund (legal arm) http://www.alliancedefensefund.org and Family Research Council (political arm) http://www.frc.org/.


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