OKCupid's Brilliant Response to Mozilla's Antigay CEO

Online dating giant OKCupid just made its position clear in the ongoing dust-up over the presumably unchanged antigay views held by Mozilla's newly appointed CEO, Brendan Eich.

After Mozilla named Eich, a cofounder of the company and inventor of JavaScript, as the tech firm's new CEO March 24, LGBT advocates and coders called to attention Eich's $1,000 donation to pass California's Proposition 8 in 2008. Although Mozilla has reiterated the company's commitment to LGBT equality -- including support for marriage equality, trans-inclusive health coverage, and domestic-partner benefits -- Eich's personal response left some upset with what he didn't say: whether or not he still opposes the freedom to marry.

That was enough for OKCupid to take a none-too-subtle jab at singles using Mozilla's top-rated Web browser, Firefox. When users try to log on to OKCupid from Firefox, they'll see this note:

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.

If you want to keep using Firefox, the link at the bottom will take you through to the site.

However, we urge you to consider different software for accessing OkCupid.

The team at OKCupid does then provide a link to allow Firefox users to access the site from the Mozilla browser, but it's clear the dating site would really rather users join in the boycott. Those who want to add their voice to those demanding that Eich clarify his position on marriage equality can sign a petition ordering Eich to do just that at CredoAction. That petition has more than 67,000 signatures as of this writing.