eHarmony settles over same-sex dating

Online dating service eHarmony.com has agreed to create a new website for matching same-sex couples, as part of discrimination settlement with New Jersey's Civil Rights Division. The agreement comes more than three years after New Jersey resident Eric McKinley filed a formal complaint against the matchmaking company over its …

[Anonymous Coward]

They should call it...

...eHomony!

Anonymous for good reason.

[Anonymous Coward]

doubt it'll matter...

...from my experience of gay online dating sites the number of people on there looking for one thing and one thing only well outnumber the people looking for dates as we know them so the 'well researched and patented rules' can just be put aside.

< mine's the one with the ripped up copy of 'how to find love' in the pocket

[Simon Wilson]

Atheists

Now all they need to do is let atheists join too, and I'll almost consider the founder to be a human being.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not just gays...

If you don't say you're christian (i.e. select atheist or agnostic on their list) then they instantly come back and say "sorry, we can't match you"

If you submit the exact same profile except tick the "I'm christian" checkbox, they have no problem finding matches. Bigoted bastards.

Does anyone know if this lawsuit is in progress?

[fluffy]

This might be harder for them to pull off...

Where are they going to find a bunch of gay Jehova's Witnesses (or JW willing to pretend to be gay) to fake-date members?

[Pierre]

Stoopid merkins

I noticed that www.bluegayfuckboy.com does not offer a single product aimed at straight people. Shirley it is some kind of discrimination, I will sue them to death! Similarly, www.mydoggydog.mutt.com does not say anything about horses. I hate dogs as much as I love horses, and I feel very very very discriminated. Gimme da monnies.

Now for the real ideas that might actually work: the christiancafe.com website offers a dating service that is discriminative against me as a jew / muslim / hindu / animist / atheist / wuteva. Sue sue sue sue!

Man, I tell you, this country is so fucked up, I say we nuke them from orbit. Only way to be sure.

[GettinSadda]

Free?

"He'll also get a free one-year subscription to the new website."

...

"Registration at the Compatible Partners site will be free for the first 10,000 users registering within one year of its launch."

So, not much in the way of compensation that!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why

What business of the governments is it to tell someone how to run their business?? NONE!! Eharmony should have filed a counter claim against the govt of new jersey. They have absolutely no right telling them what they can and cannot do in their business. Thats like telling McDonalds they have to start selling Whoppers because somebody got offended that they didnt.

Paris because even she understands business better than they do sometimes.

[yeah, right.]

Both kinds

They got both kinds of religion in the USA, Christian AND Born again! (with apologies to Blues Brothers).

[Christopher Martin]

eHarmony does make a good point

Wikipedia quote: "Warren responds that he has not done the same amount of research on same-sex match-making as he has done on heterosexual match-making. He also notes that eHarmony is about marriage, and that same-sex marriage is illegal in most states."

Yep, that's right, gays. Inalienable right to dating sites, no right to a legally recognized union. My state held it to a public vote, and nearly unanimously voted against same-sex marriage. Nobody's allowed to be a bigot, except everybody :(

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Stoopid merkins

I guess that the people in charge of that company were really searching for an excuse to start a business in gay people while getting an excuse to straight people for doing it without saying 'we are in favor for gay people'.

[Alan White]

RE: Why

If it wasn't for those meddling bureaucrats, I could be eating a freshly reheated ratburger hot off the floor, right now!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re:doubt it'll matter...

So what you are saying is that this new site they are having to create will end up just becoming one big gay fuckfest? I thought that was what Adultfriendfinder was for......

Similar to others here, I find it ridiculous that a site can be sued for NOT having a gay offering and yet sites exist which cater ONLY for gays. I love it when equality only works one-way.

[James Woods]

lol@gayz

how is a lifestyle choice now discrimination. what's next, a human-animal e-harmony site? For those that well have a gleam for good o'le pebbles? These homosexuals will just push and push and push and push until finally they themselves are pushed. That day is coming. No offense to all the homosexuals out there that are living their lives rather then smearing everyone elses life with their lifestyles and forcing it into our homes and schools.

[Anonymous Coward]

Mixing up of sexualities

As a hetrosexual male ( well I was last time I looked), if I signed up to a dating site then I'd only be interested in women, so I wouldn't want gay men being returned in my search results.

Obvious huh?

One way around that would be to have a check box indicating ones sexuality and if people used it honestly and correctly, then you could have a single database with the full set of sexual preferences and it wouldn't cause an issue, but my experience of adult and dating/contact sites is the site would be misused by men pretending to be women ( funny that, seems to happen a lot on the internet), transvestites and transexuals.

I know women that have gone on a date with another woman and found that she wasn't a woman after all but a transvestite and the date was clearly told that the lady wasn't interested in meeting a guy or tv. And she felt deceived by him.

Mixing up sexualities in a database will only lead to complications: I guarantee it will be misused. So I think rejecting gays from the original website was a reasonable thing to do.

Being a straight guy, why would I even be interested in signing up to a gay dating site? And I'm certainly not going to complain if I can't! Makes you wonder about the real motivations by the original case.

However, I'm not certain that forcing the company to create a new website specifically for gay people was right, no company should be forced to spend money building a new website.

I'm sure there are gay only dating websites so why not just go and use one of them, or create your own? As a straight guy, I have ( in my opinion) no right to force a gay dating company create a straight dating website for me.

[Anonymous Coward]

A title is required...

On conventional dating sites, in *general', dates only happen because there are women involved. There are women who only want one thing, and there are men who want a real relationship, but...

Anyway, cue the legion of butthurt neocons whining and grining about the Homosexual Menace (Now In *Your* Home, With Threatening Pink Leotard - omg theyre gonna make it *compulsory*!).

[RaelianWingnut]

In the future, *everyone* will be stupid...

@Pierre

People are often some combination of abysmally stupid, fucking evil, and essentially repulsive. The *cool* thing about the internets forum is it allows you to see that without the rose-tints.

Your watchword for the new millenium is:

Y so srs?

[Anonymous Coward]

What about bisexuals?

Are they meant to sign up to both sites?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Why

Yeah, what next, they'll say that Black people are allowed to seat with Whites and Rednecks in buses?

Businesses should be allowed to be run their own way, and shoot customers on sight if they don't have exact change, too.

We don't need no stinkin' governements to have rules and whatnot. Let's get naked and go back to the trees! Societies and laws are for losers!

[Peyton]

@why

Are you serious?? We have tons of laws telling businesses how they must run. To use your example, McDonald's, et al, have to make nutrition information available to their customers. Doesn't matter if McDonald's doesn't want to.

I kind of agree with the dismay expressed about the decision... I did not know about the atheist/agnostic thing - that's an eye-opener. In light of that, it seems to me that they may have had two options: 1)Settle like they did or 2)Own up to the fact that they have a "Christian" (please note the quotes) agenda. I'm left wondering why they would want to keep that under wraps - hiding your Christian beliefs is usually considered contrary to being a Christian anyway, and it may have left a window open for them under "freedom of religion" to operate as they see fit.

[Anonymous Coward]

sooo, knowing that...

a dating service is oriented toward heterosexual Christians, why, oh why would anyone with an ounce of sanity who isn't both of these want to patronise the business? Because it has bugger all to do with access or availability and everything to do with a political agenda.

As a previous poster had said, ain't it great when that "equality" thing only works one-way, but then again, this only reinforces the stereotype that a disproportionate percentage of these people are fucked up in the head...

[Pascal Monett]

The real whopper

There's always somebody who gets offended in Merkinland.

[J]

Stupid...

Stupid decision indeed. I always support civil rights causes, the gay one included (I'm not one, but I wish them to have the same rights I have), but this is quite stupid. Don't like a *private* site's policies? Go elsewhere! Maybe Match.com allows same sex searches... Someone else does, I suppose. Now I AM atheist, and I didn't know they discriminated against the likes of me. So, will I fight for the right to give these idiots my money? Hell, no. Again, their competition DOES allow me there without any restriction, and I did meet some cool girls around, in one case leading to a 2-year relationship. Have to try harder next time, maybe? :-)

@lol@gayz

"rather then smearing everyone elses life with their lifestyles and forcing it into our homes and schools"

Don't be afraid, they are not doing that. Because they don't need. "Their" lifestyle has always been in your homes and schools (it was worse in the past, I'd suppose, when schools were gender segregated), and will always be. That lifestyle is particularly rampant in the churches though, so you might focus your energies there instead.

@AC "So I think rejecting gays from the original website was a reasonable thing to do."

Er... FAIL. Can you read what you yourself wrote? If they are lying to begin with (as you said earlier, man pretending to be woman, etc.), why would they answer truthfully when registering to begin with? Or would the site have to come over to check your gonads or something? Anyway, it is in the best interest of the site that the returned profiles are good. In the one site I've used in the past, you enter "I am a ___ looking for a ____" using the drop down lists, and I've never seen anything but ladies. I never tried putting "man/man" or "woman/woman" there, though.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm atheist and am getting lots of matches...

While I winced at the fact the site is apparently run by Xtians, I am looking for a committed relationship and liked their approach far better than match.com and others-- I signed up as an atheist and am getting scads of apparent matches-- though I haven't gotten around to getting my picture up or subscribing yet, so I suppose they could be phonies (if so, there's the bit of fraud I'd like to see exposed). One of these days I'll get a decent picture taken and actually subscribe and find out if it's all bait-and-switch or not...

[Anonymous Coward]

While I personally don't give a damn,

I now have to liable my brothers and sisters in the sysadmin world as the Second laziest people in the world, simply because of the apparent non-existence of any enterprising members in the GLBT community for being smart enough to simply license the code from eHarmony.com and set up a site devoted for that particular lifestyle.

[Anonymous Coward]

Dating sites

Do I get to hate social FAIL and commerce or just those pesky homosexuals who aren't 18 year old Eastern European girls?

[Anonymous Coward]

eHarmony worked well :)

My Wife and I met on eHarmony (though neither of us are Christian), and have been married for almost 5 years now.

While I can understand the reasons for not wanting to expand to same sex matches (lack of research, etc), if the information behind eHarmony can do for others what it did for us, I am all for it.

Some of the nicest, longest lasting couples I know are same sex couples. There are issues anywhere, but I can't understand while several US states actually voted to ban same sex marriage. Just because another couple would like to get married (and is same sex) does not make me love my wife any less...