North Star Writers Group - Syndicated Commentary: Opinion, Humor and Features

November 24, 2008

eHarmony’s Capitulation Means eTyranny Coming to a Church Near You

So let me get this straight.

Mild-mannered evangelical Christian psychologist creates innovative Internet service. The business model: Create matches made in Heaven by applying serious scientific research derived from studying thousands of marriages. (We’re not talking The Bachelor or Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire here.)

New company gets picky to ensure success. It focuses like the proverbial laser beam on well-adjusted single men and women. In other words, no married men out cruising for new action. No creeps crawling the web. No suicidal Fatal Attraction harpies.

The result: Tens of thousands of matches. And the opportunity to strengthen the institution of marriage at a time when silver anniversaries are scarcer than Wall Street jobs.

“We are carefully following (10,000 marriages) to make sure that they work in every way,” averred the service’s founder in 2005. “When the number of couples reaches 100,000 in the next few months, it will be obvious that we have begun the job . . . of changing the world.”

Until the enterprise doing all this heavenly good finds itself in litigation hell – pressed by parties who insist that it enter a business in which it has no expertise, and that is diametrically opposed to its core values.

The company stuns the world by settling the admittedly weak case – not to mention offering freebies to the first 10,000 customers in a service it never wanted to enter as atonement for a “wrong” to which it never admits.

Welcome to the Brave New World engulfing eHarmony – and its visionary, grandfatherly marriage doc founder, Neil Clark Warren – who have agreed to settle a New Jersey complaint brought by a homosexual who felt wronged by the service’s hetero focus.

You see, the fact that eHarmony and Dr. Warren were spreading some happiness in their corner of the universe wasn’t good enough for the militant fringe who want to remake society in their own out-of-the-mainstream image – and the strike-suit legal sharks who help them bludgeon well-intentioned and perfectly legitimate endeavors into submission.

eHarmony had lawyered up with a high-powered former top litigator for Uncle Sam. And experts weighing in variously characterized the plaintiff’s claim with terms like “novel” (attorney-speak for “whack”) and “quite a stretch” (legalese for “not a snowball’s chance”). Nevertheless, a single bureaucrat last year issued a “Finding of Probable Cause” that eHarmony’s failure to enter a business it knew nothing about constituted unlawful discrimination.

And because counsel felt that “litigation outcomes can be unpredictable” (translation – we’re not betting our perfectly good company in the litigation lottery), the service agreed to launch a new service designed for same-sex “couples,” offer the first 10,000 memberships free and pay a total of $55,000 in hush money to the state and the plaintiff.

For eHarmony, its action was about “moving beyond this legal dispute” (PR spin meaning “cutting our losses and keeping ourselves out of the headlines”). For the rest of us, the company’s understandable but unfortunate capitulation is a further descent into “eTyranny.”

If the eHarmony contretemps and its venue somehow strike you as déjà vu all over again, you’re not just channeling Yogi Berra. The Garden State was, in fact, home to a prior case finding a service organization – the Boy Scouts – in contempt of the law for wanting to uphold its moral standards by barring gays from consorting with teenage boys. Fortunately, the Scouts decided to take their cause all the way up to that Big Court on First Street, NW in D.C. – where the Justices slapped their New Jersey counterparts down by a razor-thin 5-4 margin.

You think it didn’t enter the minds of eHarmony’s team that, since the Boy Scout ruling, the Lawrence decision had anointed homosexuality as a newly protected right? And that by the time any ruling and possible appeals wound their way up to the High Court, it would be reshaped – by one Barack Obama?

The president-elect, you may recall, has promised to pursue “the goal of full equality for the millions of (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered) people in this country” and dedicated himself to the proposition that “federal law should not discriminate in any way against gay and lesbian couples.”

What’s one sure way to advance that agenda? You guessed it. And speculation is that Barry O will have at least two and maybe four chances to pack the Court with like-minded thinkers.

Today, eTyranny is rewriting online business plans. Tomorrow, you can drop the “e” – and look for Barack-ocrats to be recasting creeds in a church near you.

If the company founded by an evangelical psychologist – and operated according to his values – can be coerced by litigation into launching a whole new line of services, what’s to stop same-sex couples emboldened by sympathetic Supremes from similarly extorting pastors to marry gays or baptize their adopted children?

Alarmist? Remember, it only took one bureaucrat to push Dr. Warren to the wall – and one vote in Massachusetts and California to push “gay marriage” over the top. Any people of faith (religious talk for “homophobes”) who believe that forum-shopping can’t produce similarly frightening results for their own congregations simply aren’t keeping up with their current events.

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