It’s scientifically provable that digestion is the same for black people and white people. Prove to me that matching couples is the same for gays as it is for heterosexuals.
I build websites in ASP. If, say, “PHP Lovers Of America” approached me and told me they wanted to hire me to build a website, with the caveat that it HAD to be in PHP, it would be within my rights as a businessman to choose not to work for them even if the PLA told me over and over “but PHP is just like ASP!” That’s not descrimination.
Easy. One is a private enterprise choosing not to do work outside its area of expertise; the other is a government legislating morality based on religious principals.
Because they appear to be in violation of California law. If their excuse for violating that law is that there’s some fundamental difference between homo- and hetero- relationships that would make it impossible for them to provide the same level of service to homosexuals, they need to be able to show some sort of evidence for that difference.
And I wouldn’t expect it to, but anecdotal evidence is still an improvement over no evidence whatsoever, which is what eHarmony has provided to back up their claim.
On a demographic level, yes, I am. My relationship with my last boyfriend was probably a lot different than your relationship with your last girlfriend. It was probably also a lot different than matt_mcl’s relationship with his last boyfriend. But I don’t see any evidence to believe that my relationship had more in similar with matt’s than it did with yours, just because we had a similar number of penises involved.
Both, naturally. Of course they’re going to need to make their case in court, but they’re making an extrordinary claim, one that I’ve never heard any evidence to support, and which runs counter to my personal experience. Am I the only one here who thinks this is a provacative idea, irrespective of any entangling legalities?
The claim is that the matching algorithms they currently use would not work with homosexual couples. The obvious way to test it is to apply those same algorithms to gay singles, and see if the resulting matches have a higher or lower rate of success than they do when applied to straight couples.
Sorry, that’s not how it works. You’re the one making the extraordinary claim, here. You’re the one who needs to provide evidence to back it up.
Actually, it is. It’s just not a kind of discrimination that’s illegal, immoral, or unethical. I don’t see any evidence that what eHarmony is doing is necessarily immoral or unethical, but it does appear to be illegal. No one seems to have any arguments for why this does not violate California’s non-discrimination law, so we now have to figure out if following the law here is placing an unfair burden on eHarmony. I say that it does not: following the law would require a trivial investment of resources, and would not impact the service provided to current members of the dating service, and would not. eHarmony claims that they are unable to provide the same level of service to gay couples that they do to straight couples, and so should be excluded from this law. I certainly don’t expect anyone to just take my word on the matter as gospel truth, but I’m surprised at how many of y’all are willing to take eHarmony’s claims at face value.
Again, that’s a good explanation for why I should be upset at one instance, and indifferent to the other. But it doesn’t explain why that particular argument is valid in one instance, and invalid in another.
What if the matching criteria has to do with matching traits of one gender that would complement the other. For instance they have found that a male who likes to skydive is a good match for a female who likes cats. How would one adapt this to a homosexual relationship?
You may be asking them to provide a service that they physically can’t - they just don’t have the ability. By forcing them to provide what the can not you almost ensure failure which may hurt the very people you wish to help.
But what is their claim? As near as I can tell, their claim amounts to “We don’t have confidence in our ability to match same sex partners.” How can you test someone’s claim of incompetence?
And it’s quite possible you’re right. It’s also quite possible you’re wrong. I simply don’t know, and neither do you, because I’ve never been gay and you, I would presume, have never been straight.
If you were the only one here who thought that we wouldn’t be on the second page of the thread.
It’s interesting that this coincides with the Montreal case where a woman was refused service at a gay bar for, well, being a woman. Apparently a degree of sexual-orientation-exclusivity is not uncommon in dating-oriented businesses (Bar Le Stud, as it is called, markets itself as a meat market.)
This makes sense to me. But it would take years and years to do; it’s just not possible to do this is a period of time reasonable for resolving the case in court.
If eHarmony’s claim is that they’ve got some evidence their system works for straight couples, but they don’t have evidence it works for gay couples, I don’t see how that could be disproven without running a test that would take years to complete. They don’t have to show they actually tested it on gay couples to say they don’t have any evidence it works for them; they just have to say they have no evidence it DOES work, or some limited evidence it might not, and so don’t want to risk lowering the success rate. But maybe they do have such evidence; I don’t know.
Nobody in the thread has made any extraordinary claims with respect to eHarmony’s methods. Nobody has anything to prove to you.
The matter will be resolved in court, and $5 says it goes in favour of eHarmony.
I’ll give you this much, kanicbird. The perspective you bring to any debate is always unique. And I, for one, am thankful for that.
Actually, what I’m asking them to do is demonstrate that they cannot do it. If there is something about men who skydive that makes them uniquely attractive to women who own cats (a holdover, no doubt, from when our cave-dwelling ancestors used to forage for food for their mates domesticated felines by throwing themselves out of primitive airplanes with parachutes made out of mastodon hide) then they should be able to demonstrate that this applies only to heterosexual couples, and not at all to homosexual couples.
First of all, it’s spelled “guinea pigs,” and second, what the hell are you on about?
Well, then too bad for them, because “I suck,” isn’t usually a valid defence for violating the law. They’ve put this forward as a legal defence: they’re going to need to substantiate it if they want it to be taken seriously.
You’d presume wrongly.
I think we made it this far because people love to argue, regardless of the topic. I don’t see anyone else in this thread who’s questioning eHarmony’s claim, though. Most of you all seem willing to take it at face value.
This GD thread dealt with a similar situation in Australia, where a gay club got a special exemption from the government allowing them to refuse service to women and straight men. It’s an interesting situation, all around.
Then eHarmony’s pretty much fucked, aren’t they?
If they don’t have any evidence, they don’t have any business making the claim.
eHarmony is claiming that they can’t provide the same service to gays that they do to straights, because there’s something in the nature of the two relationships that makes their current matching system not work on gay people. If, as you suggested above, they don’t have any evidence for this claim, then this is not a valid reason to not provide the same service to gays as they do to straights. And before we get any more spectacularly inept analogies, in most situations, a company does not need a reason not to provide a specific service. Except in this case, where there’s a law that apparently says that they do need to provide this service. If they want an exemption to the law, they need to show good cause as to why they deserve one. “We don’t know if we can do it or not,” isn’t good enough.
They said nothing of the sort. They said that based on your psychological profile and on whatever other limiting parameters that you entered (age range, maximum distance, etc.) that there weren’t enough women in their database to make eHarmony worth your time and money. What on Earth is wrong with that? Would you have preferred to waste $30 for nothing?
I think that most of us feel that it’s irrelevant whether or not their claim is true.
What if they also found that males who like cats are not a good match for females who skydive? (which I should have added above)
I would strongly WAG that whatever their matching criteria is it’s gender based, matching male traits to female traits. No I don’t know it to be true, but it seems to make sense. Unless you are going to define one person of a homosexual relationship as the opposite gender I can’t see how it would work, but now we have this idea:
Okay, but what if they didn’t find that out? If there is a legitimate reason why the tools they use to match make now couldn’t be adapted for use with homosexual couples, that’s fine. eHarmony has got their excuse for not doing it, and all’s well in the world. But so far, there’s no evidence that this is true: we have eHarmony’s entirely unsubstantiated claim that there’s a huge difference that they can’t possibly bridge. Until they pony up some evidence to back this up, I don’t see any particular reason to believe them.
How is it irrelevent? It’s thier defence for being in violation of California law. Wether or not the claim is true strikes me as being pretty fucking crucial to the debate.
There are short men annoyed at eHarmony because they can’t get any matches. Apparently, the program won’t match a woman with a man who is shorter than she is.
That’s fascinating. All along I’ve been told you’re born gay or straight. You converted? How?
The only party to any of those who has any knowledge of eHarmony’s abilities, or lack thereof, is eHarmony. They’re the only expert opinion in the discussion.
Interesting question. eHarmony isn’t the one suing anyone; are they also to be forced to engage in years of testing now to prove they’re unable to do something? Doesn’t that strike you as being a little draconian?
What claims have they made? eHarmony’s claim is that they’ve put together a scientifically validated method for matching men and women. If that is in fact the case, but that’s also as far as they’ve taken it, then they are perfectly correct to state that they have NOT scientifically validated a methodology for matching same sex couples. They haven’t invalidated their method, I’d assume, but nor has it been validated. So their statement, which amounts to “We have empirical evidence this works for men and women, but we do not have empirical evidence for for same sex couples” is perfectly correct.
It’s quite possible they have even more evidence, or that they have less, than they say they do. Frankly, I don’t know and neither does anyone else except them. Now, I think it’s quite understandable why they don’t want to publicize their own research - it’s a trade advantage. So it’ll have to be discussed in court.
What you appear to be saying is that eHarmony cannot be trusted to say “we don’t think we can do this,” and that instead it’s on eHarmony now to run validating tests for same sex couples, assuming they haven’t already - which, of course, would take years, and by your own admission they’d be “fucked.” So the case will sit in court all that time. Who wins this?
It’s just my guess that the courts will find a way to exclude this service from the precise letter of the law; eHarmony will likely trot out enough examples of online and bricks-and-mortar services that cater exclusively, or very strongly only, to gays to get the court to accept that services designed for a sexual orientation are different from a service that sin’t, but denies service according to it.
They’ll probably also point out that eHarmony DOESN’T prevent gays and lesbians from using it. It simply doesn’t offer the service of matching the paying customer with a same sex partner - clearly a bit of weasel logic in some circumstances, but in this particular case it does seem relevant to this layman. What, really, is the difference between this and a gay dating site that doesn’t match up straights?
Of course, the plain language of the Unruh law has also been used to ban “Ladies’ Nights” so I could be wrong.
This reminds me of a case several years back where a hair salon was sued because they turned a black person away. Their defense was that they didn’t know how to cut black hair, as it requires certain training. I remember it was a big controversy at the time, and was discussed on the local radio stations. One black woman called in and said she didn’t see a problem with what the salon did. (As I recall, she said she & her son were turned away from a salon for the same reason, and as she put it, “They said they couldn’t do it, and I’m so grateful they didn’t try!”) I think part of her reasoning was that it’s not like in this city there is a shortage of salons that do have expertise in black hair, so it was easy enough to go somewhere else, and be assured that the stylist knew what they were doing. It seems to me this could apply here…as long as there are other companies satisfying the market demand for this service (gay matchmaking), what difference does it make if eharmony specializes in straight matchmaking?
It will be interesting to see if eHarmony can document any scientific research at all, even on heterosexuals. According to this Reuter’s story:
This rings all kinds of potential alarm bells to me, among them the idea that a group like this is even capable of doing valid scientific research on human psychology and sexuality of ANY types.
My WAG is that all this criteria was made up to match “good christian couples”. eharmony probably feels it’s already met the real world more than half way by allowing Jews and atheists to register, but gays are just going too far for them. Their claim will ultimately end up being, “There are no good matches between men and men or women and women.” They will basically be uncloseted as gay bashers, and their market share will shrink drastically.
Please note that, like Nostradamus, I cannot offer any evidence whatsoever that what I have foretold will come to pass. Still, I expect to be held to this prediction. If it hasn’t happened in the next 500 years or so, I will post my apology in this thread.
I haven’t converted to anything. I’m the same orientation now that I have been for my entire life.
No one else in the entire world has ever studied gender relationships and sexuality? Huh. That’s wierd, I always sort of assumed that there was more research going on in that field.
Well, what’s the alternative? Every time a corporation is caught violating the law, they get off scot-free if they just explain that they don’t know how to run their company any other way?
You’re absolutely right, I don’t think eHarmony can be trusted in this respect. That’s why we have trials and stuff: because sometimes, when caught in an apparent violation of the law, people lie to cover their asses. In this case, eHarmony is making a claim that seems absurd on its face: that they’ve got special “het only” matching algorithms that won’t work on gay people, and nobody there knows how to fix 'em so they will. When someone makes a statement that’s both self-serving and highly unlikely, I tend to view that statement with a fair amount of skepticism.
In this case, we know that it is, in fact, possible to run a succesful dating service that caters to gay people. We’ve no evidence at all that running such a service requires any specialized knowledge beyond that required to do the same for straight people. eHarmony is claiming that there is some sort of specialized knowledge necessary, and that they do not possess that knowledge. That, to me, is an extrordinary claim, and one I’ll need to see evidence of before I accept it.
Now, if it’s true that they really don’t know if they can do a good dating service for gays, and that they should get a special exemption from California law to protect them from having to follow it, then they’re going to need to prove their case. And if that means spending years running tests on their software to make sure it works the same, then tough shit for eHarmony. They either run the tests, or they suck it up and start following the law. “But it’s haaaAAAAaard!” isn’t a valid legal defence.
Which brings us back to the question I put to Turok: if I don’t accept this argument when applied to gay marriage, why should I accept it when applied to gay dating?
As I said earlier, if eHarmony is required by law to provide equal service to gays and straights, than so too would any gay-only dating sites be required to serve straight clientele.
I think you are mixing apples & oranges here, though. I can understand the argument that the STATE shouldn’t discriminate between straight couples and gay couples, but I’m not sure it’s the same thing when talking about a private organization. Even if the state makes same sex marriage legal, they can’t, for example, force a church to marry gay couples.
