OkCupid, like a good friend, wants you to get out there—and date. That makes sense since, after all, it is a dating site. OkCupid doesn’t really care how you use its site to find Mr. Right. But, actually it does. On OkCupid on Monday, the site took a brief break from the ups and downs of dating, if not love, to make sure you’re doing it right. And for OkCupid that means you can access the site however you want—other than you should never, ever use Firefox. If you happen to be logging in, or just accessing the site via Mozilla Firefox on Monday, here’s what OkCupid had to say about web-based life choices:
Hello there, Mozilla Firefox user. Pardon this interruption of your OkCupid experience. Mozilla’s new CEO, Brendan Eich, is an opponent of equal rights for gay couples. We would therefore prefer that our users not use Mozilla software to access OkCupid. Politics is normally not the business of a website, and we all know there’s a lot more wrong with the world than misguided CEOs. So you might wonder why we’re asserting ourselves today. This is why: we’ve devoted the last ten years to bringing people—all people—together. If individuals like Mr. Eich had their way, then roughly 8% of the relationships we’ve worked so hard to bring about would be illegal. Equality for gay relationships is personally important to many of us here at OkCupid. But it’s professionally important to the entire company. OkCupid is for creating love. Those who seek to deny love and instead enforce misery, shame, and frustration are our enemies, and we wish them nothing but failure.
OkCupid also gave a little context for its stance: “In 2008, Mr. Eich supported the passage of California’s Prop 8, a statewide initiative to ban gay marriage, with a $1000 donation. Granted, his contribution is now six years in the past, and people can change. But Mr. Eich’s boilerplate statements in the time since make it seem like he has the same views now as he did then.” Eich, for his part, has tried to counter the perception that he is anti-gay with a blog post last week called “Inclusiveness at Mozilla.” And Mozilla Firefox posted this blog post over the weekend “to clarify Mozilla’s official support of equality and inclusion for LGBT people” after being “asked a number of questions about Brendan Eich’s appointment as CEO.”
*This post has been updated.
