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Wednesday November 19, 2008

Categories: Homosexuality

Lawsuit forces online dating service eHarmony to offer service to gays and lesbians.

eHarmony said it will launch the new same-sex dating site, named "Compatible Partners," by March 31.

The settlement was the result of a discrimination complaint filed by Eric McKinley against eHarmony in 2005, which will be dismissed under the settlement agreement.

eHarmony was founded in 2000 by evangelical Christian Dr. Neil Clark Warren and had ties with the influential religious conservative group Focus on the Family.

Serious question to lawyers in the house: What's to prevent a heterosexual from successfully suing, say, an online gay dating service for not providing services for straights?

I wish somebody would, just to force them to defend it.

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Comments
MH - Annoyed Agnostic
November 20, 2008 7:33 PM

According to the Friendly Atheist web site eHarmony doesn't allow atheists to join either. Basically eHarmony was the Boy Scouts of online dating. So this is either the atheists chance to sue and let people hear them roar, or they really are the most hated minority.

pentamom
November 21, 2008 12:46 PM

Daniel, the "service" people were seeking was a service not offered by eharmony, just as the men's clothing store doesn't offer women's clothing. So, yeah, if that is the only service they're willing to accept, they go away unserved. Eharmony wasn't sending mind rays into people's brains to determine whether they were thinking "gay" thoughts -- they were refusing to match people with people of the same sex. Presumably they'd be happy enough to match those people to people of the opposite sex, assuming the service they sought was otherwise well suited to eharmony's service (as in, it's well known that its service is aimed at stable relationships, not hookups. They don't match already married people, etc.)

Same goes for MH -- the service of matching atheists or matching people to atheists isn't a service eharmony offered. People don't go there to find atheists to marry. That's not what the service is for.

You all are acting like a person's sexual orientation or religious beliefs are peripheral to eharmony's service in the way they'd be peripheral to a restaurant's service. But sexual orientation and religious beliefs are part of the "ingredients" of the service they offer. It is far more like insisting on vegetarian meals at a steakhouse (and as someone observed up above, a Hindu requesting vegetarian food because of his Hinduism *is* doing it as a member of a protected class) than like being refused a service based on how you look or where you were born, where how you look or where you were born has nothing to do with the nature of the service.

Your Name
November 21, 2008 3:49 PM

Atheist can join eh.

kimNY
November 21, 2008 3:57 PM

Agnostics and atheist are on EH as are Jews,muslims,hindus, mormons, Jehova wittness and anyone else you can think of. The the groups in the dating advice section have groups for people living a celibate life and one called "let's talk about sex" that's for the sexually experimental set. It may have been started by a Christian, but that's about where it ends. Fornication is against the Bible too and they don't seem to be worried about unmarried hetero couples hooking up and having sex. So is this any surprise?

bubba
December 4, 2008 1:18 PM

i love sex anyway i can get it. age no preference....

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About Crunchy Con

Rod Dreher is an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News, and author of "Crunchy Cons" (Crown Forum), a nonfiction book about conservatives, most of them religious, whose faith and political convictions sometimes put them at odds with mainstream conservatives. The views expressed in this blog are his own.

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