It’s true. After a court settlement in November, 2008, online dating giant eHarmony is coming out with Compatible Partners, a new website offering gay and lesbian members the same chance to find love as heterosexual customers.

And in a move that took that gay agenda and draped it in 1960s game show dressing, a recent episode of the Ellen Degeneres Show unveiled the set of the Game Show Network’s new Newlywed Game, sponsored by eHarmony – not exactly a paragon of gay pride – as the affable host brought her wife Portia De Rossi on to play.

A segment of the Ellen show sponsored by eHarmony? How did it come to this?

Back in 2005, New Jersey man Eric McKinley wanted to experience eHarmony’s much ballyhooed matching methodology. The problem for McKinley was that he was a man looking for a man. And eHarmony’s services are strictly for heterosexual matches. So Eric lodged a complaint with the New Jersey Office of the Attorney General, Division of Civil Rights.

After two years of “back and forth, back and forth,” says McKinley, the attorney general found probable cause. At that point, the parties agreed to negotiate toward a settlement. One of the conditions? That eHarmony would agree to provide an option for same-sex connections (McKinley and the first 10,000 to join up get free memberships).

Why would a company, so heaven-bent on promoting traditional marriage, “cave in” to the “gay agenda,” as so many conservative bloggers have alleged? Why didn’t they fight?

“We chose to settle ultimately because litigation outcomes are unpredictable,” says CEO and founding investor Greg Waldorf. “We were at it with New Jersey between 2005-2008 and said, ‘This is a real burden for the company.’ We’re just moving forward with a business that we hope turns out to be successful. ”

Compatible Partners is the settlement’s lovechild – a “what’s good for business” compromise negotiated between a gay partner-seeker and a company not known for its gay-friendliness. What’s unclear is if this unholy alliance is an arranged marriage or shotgun wedding.

It’s no secret that the company’s founder, psychologist Dr. Neil Clark Warren is a born-again Christian. National ad campaigns introduced the grandfatherly Warren boasting of the company’s exclusive ‘29 Dimensions of Compatibility’ to demographics larger than their original Christian following.

From the company’s emergence in 2000, when they first marketed their matchmaking services primarily to fellow Christian websites, Warren credited much of their early ascent to his relationship with evangelical group Focus on the Family and its founder James Dobson.

Inevitably, eHarmony’s growing pains put strain on that relationship, and in 2005, Warren broke from Dobson and Focus on the Family. The break, however, did not signal any change in the company’s policy of exclusively heterosexual match-ups.

While Warren was active in the company, whenever the topic of homosexual clients arose, he would insist that the results gleaned from his compatibility matching system were based solely on research of heterosexual couples. Competitor Chemistry.com launched their own ad campaign, “Rejected by eHarmony,” poking fun at the Christian matchmaker’s rejection of all types of folks.

Warren, 74, retired from active management in 2006 yet still sits on the board, today. Interestingly, under his watch, the company began offering spouse and domestic partnership benefits to their employees back in 2004. It took the threat of a lawsuit, however, for the company to offer the “benefits” of their patented algorithms to the general public.

After so many years of claiming that their 29 Dimensions were not compatible with homosexuality, how will the company convince people that suddenly, their system will work?

Current CEO Waldorf is “very hopeful that this will work just as well in the gay community. I think that anyone who says that they’re interested in a serious relationship,” he says, “will benefit from [our] deep compatibility matching.”

Next page: Working out the quirks