Government mandates man-dating

A man in New Jersey in 2005 filed a suit against eHarmony.com under New Jersey’s Law Against… A man in New Jersey in 2005 filed a suit against eHarmony.com under New Jersey’s Law Against Discrimination. His grievance: eHarmony discriminates against gays by not arranging matches between men and men or women and women as it does between women and men. Last Wednesday, eHarmony settled with the New Jersey attorney general’s office. As part of the settlement, the attorney general required eHarmony to open a matchmaking service for same-sex couples. It’s called Compatible Partners. Compatible Partners will almost certainly be a titanic failure. It is a business created from a government mandate by an uninterested company ‘mdash; a half-hearted effort designed not to turn a profit, but just to look like a full-hearted effort in the eyes of lawyers. Would anyone really try calling their business something as bland as ‘Compatible Partners?’ It’s like if Royal Caribbean were called ‘Good Boat Rides.’ Further, there is no appeal to gays in a company that exists, as a matter of historical fact, to pander. It’s like when a kid’s mom who’s friends with your mom makes him invite you to his party. A reliable sign of Compatible Partners’ doom is that Patrick Perrine lauded the settlement. He’s the founder and CEO of myPartner.com, which is like eHarmony but for gay men. A competent businessman like Perrine should never be very amped about a new competitor. But as he explains, ‘Our compatibility system was designed by gay men for gay men and would not work for heterosexuals, or lesbians for that matter. In the same way I don’t expect eHarmony’s current compatibility system to work for same-sex daters.’ Perrine’s comments matter for two reasons: First, as much as eHarmony declined to enter the gay dating market, the invisible hand molded a slew of other companies to take the seat it neglected. MyPartner.com is the extremely popular king of that market, but it has to fight off Chemistry.com and other competitors eager to give gay couples better services for lower prices. Second, Perrine unabashedly declares his company is ‘by gay men for gay men.’ Under the settlement’s precedent, why isn’t that discrimination? He not only neglects the straight majority, but also the lesbian minority. To absolve myPartner.com, or gay male-specific cruise lines, music labels, night-clubs and porn sites is inconsistent. The sentiment behind the settlement, I believe, assumes eHarmony is something called a ‘general matchmaking service.’ MyPartner.com is a gay matchmaking service ‘mdash; totally different! ‘mdash; and it would be as ridiculous to require them to offer straight matchmaking as it would to demand that Wendy’s does so. A general matchmaking service like eHarmony pairs up people looking for long-term relationships, regardless of sexual orientation. Really, though, if I say eHarmony is a straight matchmaking service, you will agree. It just doesn’t say so outright. You can tell it’s a straight matchmaking service, however, because it only matches straight couples. Meaning is use. By forcing eHarmony to offer gay matchmaking, the government is actually forcing it to become a different business, which is a weird thing for a government to do. It’s true that eHarmony could offer gay matchmaking, but so could Wendy’s. If we argue, ‘But eHarmony is a matchmaking service, and Wendy’s is a hamburger shop,’ we appeal to an invisible, platonic form of ‘general matchmaking service’ to which eHarmony just isn’t living up. It’s not fulfilling its ‘essence,’ whatever that means, while Wendy’s can fulfill its ‘hamburger shop’ essence without offering gay dating. I think we mean it would be easy and not ridiculous to force eHarmony to become a general matchmaking service. Wendy’s would have a very hard time of it, and it’s silly to imagine, ‘COMMITTED LIFE PARTNER, FAN OF BAROQUE’ spelled out up there in white plastic on the Wendy’s Value Menu. But ease and the feeling that we are really being quite sensible about this whole affair doesn’t form a base for mandate in an open society like ours purports to be. eHarmony.com was founded by an evangelical Christian therapist named Dr. Neil Clark Warren. Critics allege eHarmony could have profitably offered gay matchmaking, but it didn’t because the company has a closet evangelical Christian ethos. This claim is irrelevant. Again, there’s implicit recourse to a ‘general matchmaking service’: I doubt anyone supports requiring fundamentalist Christian matchmaking services to offer same-sex matching. But we assume eHarmony is not in that direction, because it is not marketed that way. Is eHarmony really just guilty of vagueness? What about the mysterious BASF spots that explain, ‘We don’t make a lot of the products you buy; we make a lot of the products you buy better’?’ The gay rights movement will do best if it affirms that the law is not a knife for conservatives to etch a social vision. But the movement loses legitimacy when it steals the knife to carve a competing vision. Government and liberty have rarely been compatible partners. E-mail Lewis at ljl10@pitt.edu.