It's More Complicated Than OK Cupid Is Good And Firefox Is Bad

OK Cupid isn’t typically known for courting controversy or pushing its opinions on the general public, but today, executives decided to take a bold stand. To do so, the company outlined its own corporate message by pointing out another company’s CEO that feels differently, in this case, Brendan Eich of Mozilla.

Today, all visitors to OK Cupid’s website that attempted to enter using Mozilla’s popular Firefox browser were instead hit with a message imploring them to switch to a different browser because of Eich’s anti-gay marriage history. Apparently, back in 2008, the now CEO, who was then just a rising visionary within the company, donated $1000 to fight California’s much-discussed gay marriage bill Proposition 8. In the years since, he’s made some comments about wanting Mozilla to be an inclusive place to work, but he hasn’t exactly released any statements enthusiastically supporting gay marriage.

Here’s a partial screengrab of the OK Cupid message…

The line between standing up against bigots and going on a witch hunt to find and try and cause harm to everyone with hyper-conservative, Biblical-based religious beliefs is sometimes a very fuzzy one. A significant percentage of the country is still opposed to gay marriage, and it makes no sense to try and prevent every single one of those people from working, just as it makes no sense to prevent domestic abusers or people of low moral character from working. Our country would shutdown because we are all surrounded by people with fucked-up opinions and skeletons in their closets. In addition, the whole situation gets even murkier because Mozilla no doubt has and will continue to have LGBT employees. Last year, thousands tried to organize a boycott of Ender’s Game because of author Orson Scott Card’s anti-gay marriage views, but such action also ignored all of the LGBT and LGBT-friendly people who worked on the movie.

People aren’t caricatures and because of that, they’re very rarely “good” or “evil”, and when it comes to companies, the same is true to an even greater degree. Here at Cinema Blend, we encourage you to vote for and advocate for equal rights for all, but that doesn't mean every single one of our employees is better than every single employee of Mozilla. Life just isn't that simple and neither is the choice of what browser to use. It’s not just bigoted vs not bigoted. Not everyone who votes against gay marriage is a bad person, and not everyone who votes for gay marriage is a good person, and whittling someone down to their stance on one issue is extremely dangerous, especially since we’re all affected by where we grew up, who are families are and what religion we grew up with.

OK Cupid has spent the past decade fostering relationships between millions of people. Roughly 8% of those relationships have involved same-sex-couples, and for that, we applaud the company. For their actions today, we applaud the spirit but encourage everyone to see the entire picture.

Update: Following this article's publication, Mozilla reached out and offered Cinema Blend the following statement via a spokesman...