As part of a discrimination lawsuit settlement, dating website eHarmony has relented its staunch straights-only stance and will begin to accommodate same-sex couples. But don't shell out the big bucks for an eHarmony membership just yet -- in order to meet the terms of this order, the company will launch the creatively named "Compatible Partners" site specifically for gay-matching next March. Good old separate but equal!
The Christian-founded company has been matching couples based on "29 degrees of compatibility" for nearly a decade -- as long as those couples involve a man and a woman. (Granted, it's not just gays who don’t meet eHarmony's stringent marriagability standards: Aside from categorically rejecting those seeking same-sex relationships, the site rejects about 16% of its applicants for other various inadequacies including "those believed to have certain types of emotional instability, such as 'obstreperousness' (they just can't be pleased) and depression."
EHarmony justifies its lame hetero-ness with claims that its "scientific" technique is based on research about what makes opposite-sex marriages work. But their lawyers weren't about to see if such reasoning would hold up to New Jersey's anti-discrimination laws in court. The settlement, reached more than three years after a computer programmer named Eric McKinley brought the suit, requires the company to create the separate site, use photos of gay couples in its advertising, and post a link to the same-sex site. Membership to the new site will be free for the first 10,000 users -- perhaps because eHarmony doesn't anticipate gays lining up en masse to shell out $150 to a company that lumped them in with crazies and other unmarry-able degenerates for so long. Unless, you know, you're into that kind of thing.
-- JESSANNE COLLINS
Pseudo-science, they name is eHarmony.
Posted by: Ryan | November 23, 2008 at 02:38 PM