Malkin cuts through the haze...

The eHarmony shakedown
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2008

"Congratulations, tolerance mau-mauers: Your shakedown of a Christian-targeted dating website worked. Homosexuals will no longer be denied the inalienable “right” to hook up with same-sex partners on eHarmony. What a landmark triumph for social progress, eh? New Jersey plaintiff Eric McKinley can now crown himself the new Rosa Parks — heroically breaking down inhumane barriers to Internet matchmaking by forcing a law-abiding private company to provide services it was never created to provide.”Men seeking men” has now been enshrined with “I have a dream” as a civil rights rallying cry of the 21st century. Bully for you, Mr. McKinley. You bully.

eHarmony founder Neil Warren is the gentle, grandfatherly businessman who launched his popular dating site to support heterosexual marriage. A Focus on the Family author with a divinity degree, Warren encourages lasting, healthy unions between men and women of all faiths, mixed faiths, or no faith at all. Don’t like what eHarmony sells? Go somewhere else. There are thousands upon thousands of dating sites on the Web that cater to gays, lesbians, Jews, Muslims, Trekkies, runners, you name it. No matter. In the name of tolerance, McKinley refused to tolerate eHarmony’s right to operate a lawful business that didn’t give him what he wanted. He filed a discrimination complaint against eHarmony with the New Jersey Division of Civil Rights in 2005.

To be clear: eHarmony never, ever refused to do business with anyone. The company broke no laws. Their great “sin” was not providing a politically correct service that a publicity-seeking gay plaintiff demanded they provide. For three years, the company battled McKinley’s legal shakedown artists — and staved off other opportunists as well. eHarmony had been previously sued by a lesbian looking to force the company to match her up with another woman and by a married man who ridiculously sought to force the company to find him prospects for an adulterous relationship.

This case is akin to a meat-eater suing a vegetarian restaurant for not offering him a ribeye or a female patient suing a vasectomy doctor for not providing her hysterectomy services. But rather than defend the persecuted business, the New Jersey Attorney General intervened on behalf of the gay plaintiff and wrangled an agreement out of eHarmony to change its entire business model. The company agreed not only to offer same-sex dating services on a new site, but also to offer six-month subscriptions for free to 10,000 gay users, pay McKinley $5,000, and fork over $50,000 to New Jersey’s Civil Rights division “to cover investigation-related administrative costs.” Oh, and that’s not all. Yield, yield to the grievance-mongers:

Additional terms of the settlement include:

* eHarmony, Inc. will post photos of same-sex couples in the “Diversity” section of its Web site as successful relationships are created using the company’s same-sex matching service. In addition, eHarmony, Inc. will include photos of same-sex couples, as well as individual same-sex users, in advertising materials used to promote its same-sex matching services;

* eHarmony, Inc. will revise anti-discrimination statements placed on company Web sites, in company handbooks and other company publications to make plain that it does not discriminate on the basis of “sexual orientation;”

* the company has committed to advertising and public relations/ marketing dedicated to its same-sex matching service, and will retain a media consultant experienced in promoting the “fair, accurate and inclusive” representation of gay and lesbian people in the media to determine the most effective way of reaching the gay and lesbian communities.

I have enormous sympathy for eHarmony, whose attorney explained that they gave in to the unfair settlement because “litigation outcomes can be unpredictable.” The recent mob response to the passage of Proposition 8, the traditional marriage measure in California, must have also weighed on the eHarmony management’s minds. But capitulation will only yield a worse, entirely predictable outcome: More shakedowns of private businesses who hold views deemed unacceptable by the Equality-At-All-Costs Brigade. Perhaps heterosexual men and women should start filing lawsuits against gay dating websites and undermine their businesses. Coerced tolerance and diversity-by-fiat cut both ways."
http://michellemalkin.com/2008/11/21...e-mau-mau-ers/

[MC1171611]

Originally Posted by JaeByrd

Then again I married my pen-pal (before eHarmony was a thang) and I am a strong believer in getting to know the real person before you actually get involved with the person. Cause lets face it once they form an emotional bond with someone they aren't seeing clearly... and those things they ignore while dating don't surface until AFTER they have kids and the differences really become important.

KJB Princess and I met on a very similar forum to this one (run by Luke ) in April of 2006; it took me over a year to convince her that she loved me, and (exactly) two years before she finally married me ( ), but I must say we have probably the best relationship of any newlywed couple I've ever known. There have been some bumps, but those are from outside of our marriage (though related thereto) and not explicitly related to the internet-ish nature of our meeting.

That being said, we haven't have had kids yet...but I don't really think that'll change much. Of course our meeting and relationship is extremely different from that of most internet relationships...we didn't meet on a secular site: we became friends on a Bible discussion site and developed a romance from there. (We're far from shy...people still tell us to "get a room!!" )

I'd say to avoid the internet stuff if possible, though for us it was a safeguard: it's hard to get into trouble from 2,300 miles away.

[JaeByrd]

Originally Posted by MC1171611

it's hard to get into trouble from 2,300 miles away.

We had about 2,600 miles of ocean between us and while RIME did work we did most of our correspondence through snail mail and a few long and expensive phone calls. We wrote just about every day though. We covered almost every topic/issue that came up in later years of marriage, at least the major ones we could think of, before we saw each other face to face.

You're slow. It only took 3 months for Diligent to convince me. Another 3months to actually meet me. And 2 months after that to marry me. It has been about 14 1/2 years since we married and people still wonder if we're newlyweds.

Originally Posted by JaeByrd

We had about 2,600 miles of ocean between us and while RIME did work we did most of our correspondence through snail mail and a few long and expensive phone calls. We wrote just about every day though. We covered almost every topic/issue that came up in later years of marriage, at least the major ones we could think of, before we saw each other face to face.

You're slow. It only took 3 months for Diligent to convince me. Another 3months to actually meet me. And 2 months after that to marry me. It has been about 14 1/2 years since we married and people still wonder if we're newlyweds.

Amen, thats the way to go about it. Recreational dating, which is what dating is these days, is just what it sounds like, recreation. People go out to have a good time. The problem behind it is this, They go meet someone, "hook up" get emotionally involved, and then break up. This process repeats itself over and over and over, until finally, they do decide to marry someone, and when things get tough they see no trouble with a divorce, they just see it as breaking up again, and its becomes meaningless. Divorce literally means nothing in this day and age, people just shrug at it.

As for me, Im gonna do the whole courtship thing, which I imagine will be an experiance in itself. Going to someones father and saying, "hey, Im interested in your daughter, lets talk" Thats going to be akward. Then again Im 19, so I still have time to figure stuff out.