It took me to the end of the day to actually read the entire paper. Between the person moving very very slowly through the BART gates, to the multiple red stop hands stopping me from continuing across the street, I read the damn thing. Ok, I skimmed some. Like the praising of the 49ers for actually winning a game. And of course, for their opportunity to gush sake, it had to be Farve and his Jets. Whatever. Hey red and gold, you suck. You do. No amount of cheering and hooraying for this one particular fluke is going to change the fact that you are weak. So, stop picking up the stones and kicking the dirt in the face of the future hall of famer. You got lucky.
Continuing on to one of the articles I actually did read. Ok, opinion piece, but still. It was about EHarmony.com and how they settled. I completely agree with Mr. Lakely here, and with someone that commented on his piece saying, "I'm just waiting for heterosexuals and Christians to file lawsuits against gay match-making services so that they will have their own categories. According to this precedence, they will have every right to do so because you cannot discriminate on the basis of sexual or religious orientation. Pretty soon, everyone will be filing lawsuits against everyone else." And another comment. "And if none of this idiot's matches work out, let me guess, he'll sue."
Seriously though, as much as Mr. McKinley maybe wanted to prove a point (which Im not saying that was his actual motive, but may have something to do with the fact that eHarmony was founded by Dr. Neil Clark Warren, who had ties with the conservative group Focus on the Family, just a guess. ), this is not the way to do it.
Read opinion piece below.
EHarmony settlement erodes everyone's freedom
James G. Lakely
Monday, December 8, 2008
The decision by EHarmony to settle a sexual discrimination lawsuit last month by creating a same-sex matchmaking service is no victory for justice. It did nothing less than allow government to take away the freedom of entrepreneurs to establish and stick to their own business plans.
In 2005, Eric McKinley logged onto EHarmony's matchmaking service, and was troubled to learn that the Web site did not offer him the option of "male seeking male." McKinley promptly filed a complaint with the New Jersey Attorney General's Civil Rights Division, which picked up the case, accusing EHarmony of discriminating based on sexual orientation.
Instead of continuing to fight the government - which enjoys limitless public resources and can afford to litigate indefinitely - EHarmony decided to submit. That result should trouble anyone who values liberty, no matter where one stands on gay rights.
Simply put, EHarmony did not discriminate against McKinley - if the definition of "discrimination" is to have a meaning tethered to a modicum of common sense.
McKinley was not barred from signing up for the dating service as, for instance, blacks were barred from sitting down at whites-only lunch counters in the Jim Crow South. EHarmony simply didn't provide the service McKinley wanted: male-male matchmaking.
EHarmony's business plan was focused on what it spent enormous sums of money to research - the key components of male-female partnerships. Demanding that EHarmony accommodate same-sex clients is akin to walking into an Asian grocery store, discovering they don't have kosher meat, and suing for religious discrimination.
The issue here is freedom - specifically, economic freedom and the freedom of association. EHarmony, like any private entity or individual, has the fundamental right to associate with whomever they choose so long as no one else's rights are violated.
The Web-based matchmaking marketplace is virtually limitless, providing many online options to suit all kinds of people's needs. In fact, in the wake of a similar suit filed in California in 2007, a competing dating service (chemistry.com) started running ads criticizing EHarmony for not matching up same-sex couples.
That's how these things should be settled - in a free-market forum that protects the liberty of EHarmony to retain its business plan and different dating sites to retain theirs. The disturbing precedent set in this case logically opens up same-sex matchmaking services to frivolous but expensive lawsuits from troublemaking heterosexual clients.
That destructive road was opened because government gets very little push-back when it erodes, little by little, our constitutional freedoms.
James G. Lakely is managing editor of Infotech & Telecom News, a publication of the Heartland Institute in Chicago, Ill. To comment, e-mail him at jlakely@heartland.org.
This article appeared on page B - 5 of the San Francisco Chronicle