"Nope, Still Gay."

Below is a cute ad for a new dating service that takes eHarmony to task for not permitting same-sex matches. Imagine Karen Walker from "Will & Grace" as the centerfold in the magazine, saying: "Well, I feel a little bit uncomfortable. All of these gay eyes on me. Judging me. Undressing me. Then dressing me up again in a different outfit."




For those unfamiliar with this controversy: the founder of eHarmony, Neil Clark Warren, has well-documented ties to the evangelical world, including "Focus on the Family." Warren's primary explanation/defense of the exclusionary policy is facially-neutral: he states that the website matches people according to extensive psychological research based on straight couples, and that he does not know enough about gay and lesbian relationships to do same-sex matching. Um, okay. I'll give Warren the benefit of the doubt and assume that his "29 dimensions of compatibility" focus on physical complementarity (e.g., "What kind of pee-pee does your hoo-haa enjoy?") and therefore couldn't possibly apply to gay and lesbian relationships.

However, Warren's secondary explanation/defense is more insidious: he says that the website is intended to promote heterosexual marriage and, because same-sex marriage is illegal in most states, "We don't really want to participate in something that's illegal." But eHarmony is not billed as a "marriage" website. While the website leans toward long-term relationships (e.g., "compatibility" and "soul mates"), it is not exclusively oriented towards those seeking legal marriage. There are no questions about the legal rights and benefits of marriage (e.g., "What kind of intestate skills are you looking for in a life partner?"). Nor are there questions to weed out those who would settle for something less than legal marriage (e.g., "Does the image of a ring cause you to (a) hyperventilate, (b) throw up a little, or (c) crap your pants?"). And that's a shrewd business move on eHarmony's part: can you imagine the number of users who are perfectly interested in long-term relationships but would be spooked by an in-your-face push towards legal marriage? So if eHarmony promotes long-term relationships generally, and not just legal marriage, why does opening up the service to gays and lesbians promote something illegal? Let's leave aside the fact that many states and countries now legally recognize gay unions in one form or another.

I can't vouch for whether Chemistry.com is a good site, but I do hope that it siphons away some of the more equality-minded users from eHarmony.

UPDATE I

During an interview with NPR's Terry Gross, Warren boasted about his site's ability to match people of lots of different religions: "I'm okay with anybody who basically says, 'I deeply want to build a stronger link to the person I'm involved with. I want to have it survive over time and I want to marry somebody else who is a lot like I am. Including genitalia.' [Sorry, that last sentence may have been a transcription error. ~ed.] So when a Wiccan comes in, we will match them with a Wiccan. I don't know . . . I don't dig in and try to find out what Wiccans are all about. But I do think that we've got some fundamental principles that help people get matched in a way that will be less problematic for them over time."

When Gross asked why gays and lesbians are the one group that eHarmony doesn't match, Warren offered the "lack of research" defense: "I've seen thousands of people in therapy. I've never had a same-sex couple, uh, in therapy. I don't know exactly what the dynamics are there. We've done a deep amount of research on about 5000 married people, but never on people who are same-sex. We don't know how to do that. We think that the principles probably are different, so we've never chosen to do it. And that's the position we take."

Gross responded awesomely, "I bet you haven't done a lot of counseling of Wiccan couples either."

UPDATE II

During coverage of the French Open, eHarmony has been running ads that include the tagline "Come as you are." Nervy.

Parodies of eHarmony are a cottage industry on YouTube, but the one below is my favorite. I laughed out loud at multiple points: