Three years after
a New Jersey resident filed a discrimination suit
against Web-based matchmaking service eHarmony.com, the online dating
portal has settled out of court and agreed to offer
same-sex matchmaking services to members.
Garden State
resident Eric McKinley filed suit against the
California-based company in 2005. As part of the settlement,
eHarmony agrees to provide new services for members
identifying themselves as "male seeking a male" or
"female seeking a female" by March 2009.
eHarmony did
reserve the right to provide a disclaimer -- that its
compatibility-based matching system was developed solely on
the basis of researched focused on married
heterosexual couples.
"I applaud the
decision of eHarmony to settle this case and extend
its matching services to those seeking same-sex
relationships," New Jersey Division on Civil Rights
director J. Frank Vespa-Papaleo said in a statement
Wednesday.
eHarmony was one
of a few Web-based dating holdouts that had not ventured
into the world of offering same-sex dating services. Last
year Time magazine named eHarmony one of the five
websites to avoid, noting, among other things, its
discrimination against gay people.
Frank
Mastronuzzi, who worked for Match.com from 2001 to 2004 as the
senior manager of business development and now
oversees gay dating portal OneGoodLove.com, says Match has
always offered same-sex dating services -- but he says he
left the company because it refused to spend ad
dollars marketing to the gay community.
Around the same
time, Match launched Chemistry.com to
combat eHarmony, which was increasing in popularity. Though
Mastronuzzi says the website is a virtual replica of
eHarmony.com once you get past the first page, it
gained traction with an ad campaign featuring members
who had been rejected by eHarmony -- including a gay
man, turned away because the site didn't offer
same-sex dating services.
Mastronuzzi says
he approached eHarmony about developing a same-sex
dating site -- albeit a private-label service with no direct
connection to eHarmony.
"I was told
point-blank no," Mastronuzzi says.
Neil Clark
Warren, Ph.D., who developed eHarmony's matchmaking program,
had long rejected the idea of matching same-sex couples --
in part because he said his research was based on
heterosexual married couples. He also argued that
eHarmony is about marriage and that same-sex couples
cannot legally wed in most states.
Clark Warren was
also one of the founding members of anti-gay group Focus
on the Family.
"I think this is
a very good step in the right direction ... to admit
they screwed up," Mastronuzzi says. "But what are they going
to do differently for the community?"
According to the
settlement, McKinley will receive a free one-year
subscription to the service. eHarmony agreed to pay McKinley
$5,000 and the Division on Civil Rights $50,000 to
cover investigation-related administrative costs.
(Ross von Metzke, The Advocate)
