Well, this is interesting. There's a lawyer in California (I always cringe when a lawyer does something like this) who is suing the popular online dating service eHarmony. He says eHarmony is discriminating against him. Not because of his gender, his race, his culture, or even because he is a lawyer. They are discriminating against him, he says, because he is married.
Yes, that's right. A married man wants to be fixed up for a date with another woman - or several - and eHarmony won’t let him do it. The company has a strict “unmarried only” policy, which means that it will not arrange introductions between people who are married. Our plaintiff says that's against California law, which proscribes discrimination against people on the basis of marital status. He wants the company to go ahead and fix him up and let the women decide whether they want to wait out the finalization of his divorce or give him a pass.
Someone, perhaps one of his old law professors, should remind this litigator that when parties are separated, whether by legal separation or on a do-it-yourself basis, they retain their marital status. In short, he and his wife are married, whetherhe thinks so or not.
Granted, it has been controversial that some states require different and varying periods of separation before a divorce is final. But there is such a thing, after all, as a decent waiting period. Suppose instead of a divorce we were talking here about the death of the man's wife: what would we think of him if he started chatting up some of the single women mourners at his wife's funeral?
I see absolutely no problem with any dating service declining the 'hook up' people who are still married to others. And I can't imagine that the state's discrimination laws would protect someone from doing something all of us agree he shouldn't do: namely, a married man dating other women.
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