eHarmony Forced to Have Same Sex Website?

On November 20, 2008 someone posted a Yahoo article about eHarmony and gay marriage to a message board and said:

Check out this link - it's amazing: Is eHarmony not a private entity that can run it's website the way it wants?  Are gay websites now supposed to cater to heteros? Are Christian websites now supposed to cater to non-Christians?  What is going on?  Scary.

Later he posted a Youtube video called "banned Visa Card commercial" and said:

eHarmony should have more realistic commercials about dating, like this one

On the 23rd I responded to the video and said:

Beautiful!  Your hide/show didn't work though.

Then I wrote:

I have considered using eHarmony. I am a Christian and I like their approach of having several factors to match people. I'm not familiar with Match.com, but you need more than interests to satisfy a relationship. I think a private business should have some freedom in determining their clientele. Although I'm not sure what the consequences would be if there was total freedom and rejection of discrimination laws. A new business could always provide for the missing clientele.

Michelle Malkin did an article about this:

This case is akin to a meat-eater suing a vegetarian restaurant for not offering him a rib-eye, or a female patient suing a vasectomy doctor for not providing her hysterectomy services.

Perhaps heterosexual men and women should start filing lawsuits against gay dating websites and undermine their businesses. Coerced tolerance and diversity-by-fiat cut both ways.

On the 25th I wrote:

As for the connection to Dobson, this is what Wikipedia says:

Warren attributes much of eHarmony's initial success to its promotion on the daily radio broadcast of Focus on the Family. As the company expanded and sought broader market share, Warren parted ways with Focus on the Family and its founder, James Dobson. In 2005, Warren discontinued his appearances on Dobson's radio show and bought back rights to three of his books "Finding the Love of Your Life", "Make Anger Your Ally>", and "Learning to Live with the Love of Your Life" originally published by Focus on the Family. As Warren explained, "We're trying to reach the whole world, people of all spiritual orientations, all political philosophies, all racial backgrounds."

On Wikipedia's page about the company it says this:

About 15,000 people take the eHarmony questionnaire each day. After finding a match on eHarmony, Harris Interactive reports that an average of 236 eHarmony members marry every day.

Their lawyer is Theodore Olson who was a US Solicitor General.

From Wikipedia:

Compatible Partners is an online relationship service. Compatible Partners serves the gay and lesbian community, matching men and women with compatible singles of the same sex, taking into consideration what it considers the key dimensions of personality. Compatible Partners was launched by eHarmony Inc. on March 31, 2009. The website was launched in response to a settlement with the state of New Jersey, following a lawsuit against eHarmony for discrimination against same-sex couples.

After defending eHarmony, Theodore Olson took a dramatic change in his views of homosexuality: 

In 2009, he joined with David Boies, his opposing counsel in Bush v. Gore, to bring a federal lawsuit, Perry v. Schwarzenegger, challenging Proposition 8, a California state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.  His work on the lawsuit earned him a place among the Time 100's greatest thinkers.  In 2011, Olson and David Boies were awarded the ABA Medal, the highest award of the American Bar Association.

I met my wife through eHarmony.  Our first date was at Olive Garden on February 23, 2013.  We got married almost 2 years later.  One of her friends asked us if we wanted to be in one of the commercials, but my wife was not very interested in doing that.  I called customer service at eHarmony to cancel my account and they asked me to fill out a survey.  However, the survey only worked for active accounts so I was unable to take it.

Under our current legal system where anti-discrimination and public accommodation laws prevail, it seems like the government is forcing bigots and their victims to do business together.  I find this ridiculously unfair and so in my book on the constitution I suggest tougher property rights:

The right to own property.  Property owners shall choose whom they employ and who their customers are.  They shall choose which products to sell.  Congress and the States retain Eminent Domain powers, but must give property owners just compensation and cannot take land from one owner and give it to another owner.

Civics Quiz

On November 22, 2008 somebody posted this to a message board:

Fully 71 percent of Americans flunked a 33-question civic-literacy survey conducted by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. Among 2,508 respondents ISI randomly selected, 1,791 failed this test of U.S. historical, political, and economic basics. The average score was just 49 out of 100 a solid F. While just 2.6 percent scored Bs on this quiz, only 0.8 percent earned As.

http://www.isi.org/quiz.aspx?q=FE5C3B47-9675-41E0-9CF3-072BB31E2692

Average score for this quiz during November: 78.0%

I took the quiz and then wrote:

28/33 84.85% I guess that is a B!

I missed these ones: 4,7,27,30,33.

Three of them economic questions, how embarrassing!

I was tricked by the last question and I'm not fully sure I understand the other two.

People on the internet must know more. The average score dropped to 77.9%. Don't blame me!

Someone else wrote:

I notice they disguised a bunch of unproven pro-free-market propaganda as fact in there.  And some of the wrong answers look a lot like DNC talking points.

I responded with:

I was thinking the same thing. How dare they teach true economic theory!

The next day I wrote:

The average is down to 77.6.

4) If I were familiar with the debates, I might have known the answer. I did pick morality. Now it seems likely, that most would have considered it immoral, but I'm sure southerners used some moral arguments to defend the practice.

7) Perhaps the exact words were in the Gettysburg Address, but don't the introduction to the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence have similar notions?

14) Did Puritans oppose all wars?

27) I missed this one and I don't think I fully understand it. Isn't it true that "more tax revenue can be generated from free enterprise"? Apparently the correct answer is "the price system utilizes more local knowledge of means and ends." Now I agree that the government would not do as good at determining prices, but I'm not sure if only local knowledge is important. This answer sounds good also: "property rights and contracts are best enforced by the market system" but perhaps the government is better able to enforce laws, and would boundaries be more fickle under the market?

30) "decreasing taxes and increasing spending" Are we to assume that expenses are higher than revenues? Is government spending effective at bringing an economy out of a recession? Does the question ask, which policy is best or which is a government likely to choose? It seems the government would always choose higher spending, no matter the economic condition.

33) I overlooked that just because this year is equal, doesn't mean all of our past debt is erased. Also I didn't consider the "per person" aspect of the correct answer and just assumed that some people would be paying an unequal about of taxes to spending.

My comment that:

It seems the government would always choose higher spending, no matter the economic condition.

Led to this response:

This brings to mind a ludicrous piece on the BBC today. They interviewed a load of pressure groups about what the UK government should do about the credit crisis, and "amazingly" all of them advocated increased government spending on their own pet projects. This was then used by the BBC to show that the conservatives are wrong when they advocate caution in raising expenditure, which comes from present or future taxation.

What the BBC didn't notice is that those pressure groups invariably advocate increased government expenditure on their pet projects, and therefore their current advocacy of that is in no way indicative of what anybody thinks the best response to the credit crisis is. They were too busy rubbishing the right to realize the empty bankruptcy of their story.

In response to my comment:

I overlooked that just because this year is equal, doesn't mean all of our past debt is erased. Also I didn't consider the "per person" aspect of the correct answer and just assumed that some people would be paying an unequal amount of taxes to spending.

Someone wrote:

As did I.  The "correct" answer was true, because it was simple restating the question with a constant divisor added to each side of the equation. So trivial that most people who missed the question had looked for a deeper meaning, then translated "debt" to "deficit" to make A correct.

In response to this question:

Did Puritans oppose all wars?

Someone wrote:

Considering Oliver Cromwell was a Puritan, no.

Someone else said:

You might be thinking of the Quakers.

The introduction to the quiz says:

Full Civic Literacy Exam (from our 2008 survey)

Are you more knowledgeable than the average citizen? The average score for all 2,508 Americans taking the following test was 49%; college educators scored 55%. Can you do better? Questions were drawn from past ISI surveys, as well as other nationally recognized exams.

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Inc. (or ISI), is a nonprofit educational organization that promotes conservative thought on college campuses.  It lists the following six as its core beliefs: limited government, individual liberty, personal responsibility, the rule of law, free-market economics, and traditional Judeo-Christian values.

I took the quiz again today and scored 29 out of 33 or 87.88%.  I missed questions about the Anti-Federalists, free market securing economic prosperity, Douglas & Lincoln debates, and another on taxes and spending.

Bush's pardon prospects

On November 20, 2008, Slate had an article about the top pardon prospects for President Bush before leaving office.  I think he eventually only pardoned three people from this list: Ignacio Ramos, Jose Compean, and Scooter Libby.  On the 23rd I posted it to a message board:

Here is a list of people that might be granted clemency by President Bush before leaving office:

This one is encouraging as I wondered what would happen to them:

Texas Border Patrol guards: good chance. Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean are serving sentences of 11 and 12 years, respectively, for the nonfatal shooting in the back of an unarmed Mexican drug runner in February 2005. A jury found that the two border patrolmen then tried to cover up the shooting. Their requests for pardons have won support from numerous Republican congressmen, including Rep. Duncan Hunter of California, who introduced the Congressional Pardon for Border Patrol Agents Ramos and Compean Act. Bush left open the possibility of pardons for both men during an interview with a Texas TV station.