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Loading ...eHarmony settles gay discrimination suit
11.19.2008 2:33pm EST
(Trenton, New Jersey) Online dating service eHarmony has agreed to stop discriminating against gays and lesbians. The company has long refused to provide services to gays.
In 2005 New Jersey resident Eric McKinley filed a formal complaint with the state Division on Civil Rights. For more than three years, eHarmony vigorously contested the allegations of the complaint.On July 23, 2007, however, the Director of the DCR issued a Finding of Probable Cause that eHarmony had violated New Jersey’s Law Against Discrimination.
The company then filed a Motion for Reconsideration of the finding.
Although the state has not issued a ruling on the motion, eHarmony said Tuesday it had reached a settlement with the Attorney General’s Office.
Under the settlement in which eHarmony admits no wrongdoing the company agrees to create a new service for same-sex matching by March 31, 2009.
The company said it would call the new service Compatible Partners.
It also agreed to pay the Division on Civil Rights $50,000 to cover administrative costs and to pay McKinley $5,000 plus give him a free one-year membership to its new service.
eHarmony uses a computerized matching algorithm to put people together. It claims that among its opposite-sex matchings more than 236 members are married each day in the US. It does not say how long those marriages last.
Under the settlement agreement, the company said it reserves the right to inform those using the new same-sex matching service that the Compatibility Matching System it developed is solely based on research involving married heterosexual couples.
“Even though we believed that the complaint resulted from an unfair characterization of our business, we ultimately decided it was best to settle this case with the Attorney General since litigation outcomes can be unpredictable,” said eHarmony, Inc. legal counsel Theodore B. Olson in a statement.
The company said that the two sites will maintain their own matching pools, registration information, and subscriptions. The separate matching pools are based on whether the user chooses to seek an opposite- or same-sex relationship. As a result, users of the Compatible Partners site and eHarmony.com cannot be matched with each other.
I’m an idiot because I think forcing a company to offer a dating service they have no market interest or expertise in is ridiculous?
This isn’t a segregated lunch counter or a hospital that is refusing to treat patients. This is a straight dating service. I wouldn’t advocate using anti-discrimination laws to sue churches to marry me and my partner either.
Use the law for something real. What’s next? suing a pimp because he only offers up females? This guy may have been totally on the right side of the law, but it won’t sit well with the majority of the public. This IS the stuff that will get tossed back in our collective face, used as evidence that we’ve got some secret agenda to force on the straight population.
[Screw] eharmony!
Why would a gay person want to use a service created and run by a shit-for-brains evangelical christian!? Let the retarded fools be morons.
AJ, you’re a scholar! And that pimps and hos reference was genius! I mean, if a person offers a service for public consumption not protected by, say, the first amendment (this is more than speech and religious belief, but actual service not offered to gays and lesbians because they’re gays and lesbians), is, say, a big time loser in court because it’s both illegal and wrong– openly and actively discriminates, it’s that person’s business. That person’s business in the sense that they are the proprietor of a business that actively and illegally discriminates against a segment of the population for no other reason than than empty vacuous bigotry. And let’s not forget that that’s exactly what it is, as Dr. Neil Clark Warren–author of such classics in christian theology as “god said it, don’t sweat it”– is a focus on the family operative who’s good buddies with james weepy “Jesus called me to yes on 8″ dobson. So you can continue believing that it’s just that the metric that they use is based on years of experience and careful study of heterosexual couples…sucking up that marketing gimmick turned defense of bigotry all you want, because after all, it’s your right to be as devoid of intelligent thought as you are passionate about expressing your opinion. And it would be simply RUINOUS to devise a new metric based on so called studies for gays and lesbians….ruinous in the biblical sense, maybe.
All that said, eharmony will continue to SUCK by bringing homely breeders together to make more of themselves, and should never be used by any self respecting gay or lesbian.
AJ Said: “This IS the stuff that will get tossed back in our collective face, used as evidence that we’ve got some secret agenda to force on the straight population.”///
Yeah, kind of like how in the 1960s those uppity-you-know-whats would force their way (agenda) into “whites only” privately owned businesses.
Hmmmm…oh, but we’re something else (another species perhaps) so extremely different that our needs should not be accommodated. What is wrong with a separate “Straights Only” restaurant then as well? It’s a private business too.
EHarmony could have make their gig a private club — like the Boy Scouts — and asked for memberships and club rules and secret handshakes. But where is the mega-bucks profit in that unless you are affiliated directly with a church — like the Mormon cultists and other hustlers in the pay for pray scams.
I have to say I’m more with AJ on this one. Granted, it’s hardly an EASY question, and the need to be ever-vigilant for homophobia is a point that doesn’t even have to be argued – it’s completely understandable that visions of lunch counters might swim in our heads at first. But ultimately, I do believe the services provided by eHarmony are distinguishable from the lunch-counter example.
I say this because the orientational split is a **difference in the service being offered**, rather than discrimination as to WHOM they’re willing to serve. In the aggregate (which is the level of detail a mass-market business has to work with), I really do believe there are meaningful differences in how romance is conducted, how courting behavior plays out, which personality factors are most important, etc., in a same-sex relationship vs. an opposite-sex one. (Hell, isn’t this the very same “identity politics” advanced by academic queer theory, and to which even the more moderate of us periodically appeal, whether expressly, or by implication when we identify as a distinct community?)
In other words, matching same-sex couples isn’t guaranteed to be quite the same line of business as matching opposite-sex ones… just like a grocer isn’t necessarily going to think of himself as (or be qualified for) hardware sales simply because both are retail businesses. (And a person who approaches a dating site likely already has in mind the gender of the person she wants to seek, i.e., the nature of the marketplace service she’s procuring).
The lunch counter, on the other hand? “Sit down, sip coffee, wait for food to arrive, quietly rejoice when it does, place food in mouth with assistance from fork”. Pretty standard across any demographic boundary one could name. The same goes for just about any business that doesn’t involve providing some kind of INTERpersonal service.
Now, does this mean Neil Clark Warren is in any way a stand-up guy? Not in my book, especially given his history of involvement with fundamentalist Christianity. His original decision not to open eHarmony’s services was far from admirable, especially since his beliefs give rise to a pretty reasonable inference that in THIS case it was out of homophobia rather than a sincere business-related distinction. And it’s certainly bad PR in the extreme – a fact which chemistry.com has exploited in its own advertising (and rightly so – that’s marketing for you). I just don’t think the analogy to past racial discrimination in the marketplace holds in this case, certainly not enough to warrant dragging the guy to court. (Not only for the reasons listed above, but because of other commenters’ parallels to Manhunt – which is specifically a GAY hookup site, and I think those of us who use it prefer it that way… it’s easier to attract more gay people to a specifically-gay dating or sex site. We know that what we’re getting into is what we WANT to get into).
Any disagreements on substance, I’d absolutely love to hear them. (By substance, I mean tearing apart arguments and ideas themselves, rather than resorting to the name-calling and unwarranted psychological speculation so often deployed when someone dares to depart from the queer orthodoxy on a specific issue). Kicking this kind of stuff around is great mental exercise!
Today’s word (phrase) is “public accomodation.” Public accomodation is something like a hotel, a restaurant, a bus terminal, or anyplace considered open to the general public. A dating site seems to meet this standard.
Is it stupid? No. You can be black, go to a hair salon, and discover after the fact they don’t know fuck-all about black hair (and it’s happened). Their incompetence isn’t necessarily basis for a suit. The issue is access, and if the hair salon says they won’t take your business even though you have cash in hand, they can most assuredly be sued. Fuck up your hair? Yes. Pay you for it? Not necessarily.
The algorithmic formula hasn’t been presented as an absolute guarantee of romantic success. Yes, the basis of the formula would differ between hets and non-hets. But a successful formula would cover a continuum, not a rigid box, and would result in more successful het marriages too (think crossdressers, bi, fetishists…). That means better business for eHarmony.
What’s wrong with that? Me, I’m not interested in destroying a company, nor in demonizing it after it’s agreed to inclusive changes. The demand for inclusion is met, and eHarmony will very soon see that meeting that demand will refine their statistical model and make them MORE successful. Sounds like the beginning of a good outcome.
…But I forgot one thing. The separate service is Jim Crow. Like saying that an all-white dating service can’t serve blacks. Bullshit, and we all know it. So I for one am willing to give eHarmony this breathing room, but why not simply expand their existing formula? If it really works, it’ll eject incompatible couples of any flavor. A smart businessman sells as much of his product as he can–he doesn’t create special formulas to avoid improving the basic one.
Is this what America is becoming? A “free” country? Why should eHarmony be forced by the courts to start a new service? This is ridiculous. It’s like going to Burger King and demanding that they make a Big Mac for you or you’ll sue. I am disgusted by the lengths that some people will go to be accepted. If you want a company that matches gay people based on compatability, then start your own company. eHarmony’s rights have now been trampled all over in the name of preserving someone else’s “rights.” Their business is geared toward straight people, it is their business. Even if they only matched black people based on compatability, that would be their business. What if a straight man decideded that a gay porn company is discriminating against straight men by not having any women in the movies? Sound ridiculous? In a “free” country, we cannot trample on the rights of others while demanding our own rights.
This is not public accomodation. This is marketing. EHarmony’s rights have been trampled. The only good news is that they settled. So at least there is no court ruling enforcing a precedent this ridiculous. I’m not into supporting homophobes, but I really wish EHarmony had fought the suit and won. And then taken the plaintiff for court costs on such a frivolous suit.
Sorry, folks, but this isn’t what I call a victory. They obviously don’t want gays, and I can’t imagine why gays want them. Seriously–should gay.com now set up a straight site?
My glass is half full! So what if they are forced to do the right thing? This lets others know that they should think twice about discrimination.
I always thought it was silly to go after eHarmony. There are several dating services specifically for Gay people. If I were looking to the internet for dating prospects, I wouldn’t use a that particular service anyway.
We’ve got Match.com and Chemistry.com, so screw eHomophobia – uh, I mean eHarmony.
I’m a Life Consultant by profession. Most of my clients work on career transitions or relationship issues, including finding compatible partners.
On the one hand, from what I’ve seen of the eHarmony profiles, they’d work the same for gay people as they’d work for hets. However, I haven’t seen them work well for hets. This is just my opinion.
why should eharmony have to pay this person. Does that mean I can get paid if I attempt to join an all womans gym get turned down then sue? Rather the founder is for or against gay relationships it’s his company he should be able to choose how he want’s to run it. Antonio, I think it’s the gays that have the phobia because your scared of being, loving, and embracing the gender you were created to be.