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Comment by CurtHagenlocher | Hacker News Reader

The implication here is that OKCupid is being hypocritical. But there's clearly a difference between donating money to a candidate who has positions on a wide variety of issues -- some of which you may not agree with -- and donating money to a very specific cause.

But really, you need to treat what OkCupid is doing as some pretty clever marketing that's gotten it lots of free advertising, and not some kind of moral statement.

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"But really, you need to treat what OkCupid is doing as some pretty clever marketing that's gotten it lots of free advertising, and not some kind of moral statement."

If that is true, then that is as morally bankrupt as a company can get and I starting to believe I know who Bill Hicks was talking about.

Yea, I don't really see an issue here. I'm sure you could pull up something like this and point fingers about a specific issue for anyone who has ever donated to any candidate. Plus, these individuals opinions are not representative of their company.

I'm more curious about what the purpose of attempting to smear IAC and OkC is.

Slash and burn everything associated with someone who has a differing opinion is the most likely reason.

Nobody's personal beliefs should be representative of the company. If the guy was a Catholic, would you say that Mozilla is a Catholic organization, or that he's going to make Catholic decisions?

You may not remember that President Kennedy was accused of being "controlled" by the Vatican when he was elected because he was the first (and remains the only) Roman-Catholic president, and people were freaked out he'd take orders from the Pope. Turned out not to be the case.

  To address fears that his being Catholic would impact his decision-making,
  he famously told the Greater Houston Ministerial Association on
  September 12, 1960, "I am not the Catholic candidate for President. I am
  the Democratic Party candidate for President who also happens to be
  a Catholic. I do not speak for my Church on public matters – and
  the Church does not speak for me."[46] Kennedy questioned rhetorically 
  whether one-quarter of Americans were relegated to second-class
  citizenship just because they were Catholic, and once stated that, 
  "No one asked me my religion [serving the Navy] in the South Pacific."[47]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy

There's also a big difference between a CEO and run of the mill employee

Which is why, if you're running a company, you generally don't go barking up moral trees in the way OkCupid did, since you're speaking for a larger organization that possibly doesn't share your beliefs.

What about organizations that actively support gay rights? Where CEOs actively promote policies to advantage the status and wellbeing of gay employees eg Apple? There may well be Apple employees or investors that don't agree with that policy but CEOs can't not stand for anything because of the risk that some will be offended by their positions.

But that implies that, as employees rise through the ranks, there must come a point at which their political stance starts to matter.

We had such an arrangement here in Germany (then West-Germany) a few years back: When you wanted to become a civil servant beyond a certain pay-grade (if I remember correctly, it was the first "advanced" pay grade for schoolteachers) in the 70s, you could not be a member of certain political parties (KPD, the communist party for instance).

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