OkCupid's CEO Donated to an Anti-Gay Campaign Once, Too | Hacker News Reader

OkCupid's CEO Donated to an Anti-Gay Campaign Once, Too

motherjones.com

65 pointsghosh49 comments

TLDR (from article): "OkCupid's co-founder and CEO Sam Yagan once donated to an anti-gay candidate. (Yagan is also CEO of Match.com.) Specifically, Yagan donated $500 to Rep. Chris Cannon (R-Utah) in 2004, reports Uncrunched. During his time as congressman from 1997 to 2009, Cannon voted for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, against a ban on sexual-orientation based job discrimination, and for prohibition of gay adoptions."

So donating to a campaign for a constitutional ammendment prohibiting gay marriage is the same as donating to a politician with a broad array of other policies? Anti-republicanism aside, how is this even remotely the same thing?

It's remotely the same thing because it's about him supporting politics that many sharply disagree with.

It shows the hypocrisy of grabbing pitchforks and torches and pushing out a brilliant mind just because you disagree with his views on marriage which are the same as 51% of all of California.

My proposal: put down the pitchforks, pick up the coffee cups and talk and reason instead of pressure and bully.

> It's remotely the same thing because it's about him supporting politics that many sharply disagree with.

You're talking about a nation with a blanket two party system, the world's largest economy, and an extreme tendency to involve itself with global affairs.

I have an extreme aversion to voting for Republicans just due to the socially conservative views, but when the democratic candidates vocally support total global surveillance there's just no other choice. Supporting a candidate does not mean you support their every vote and as in all things with life, you just have to make compromises.

Having numerous parties does not inherently help with anything. There are plenty of examples of countries, eg in Europe, with lots of parties and very dysfunctional political systems.

What matters the most is the culture of a country, not whether it has 2, 4, 6, or 27 political parties. A dysfunctional culture with a dozen parties will still produce a dysfunctional political system.

> Supporting a candidate does not mean you support their every vote and as in all things with life, you just have to make compromises.

Funny how this works for candidates that you vote for but not for CEOS of products you use.

What are you talking about?

It worked for the CEO of Mozilla too. Their community just made different compromises.

This is a weak argument. Eich's actions directly attempted to cause harm to a number of people in Mozilla and in the wider community he would have been a visible and important figure in.

That's why this was different – a key requirement of Eich's position was to provide a leadership figure for the corporation and also the organisation as a whole, and it's really hard to get behind someone who's actively seeking to strip your rights or those of your friends and family. That's a large group of people to piss off and fail to apologise to.

I was going to disagree, but a Google search for Chris Cannon finds a site calling him a RINO (Republican in Name Only - the term extremists use for moderate Republicans) for his softer immigration stance.

He's in fairly safe electorate, so his main challenge is winning pre-selection. Those donations could have helped keep a Tea Party candidate out of Congress.

I guess it just goes to show you shouldn't start attacking people over a single headline.

It's the same thing because it's demonstrates the can of worms you open up when you start subjecting everyone to scrutiny of their political views that have nothing to do with they're ability to do the job their entrusted with.

Yes.

Correction: he donated to an anti-gay candidate. Also, people care more about your current position than what you believed half a decade ago. Obviously OkCupid's CEO has come around on this position (if indeed he ever was anti-gay). Or he is putting on the public appearance of having come around, which for activism's purpose is sufficient.

If Eich had come out in support of gay people during this fiasco (for example, saying something as simple as, "I was wrong, I'm sorry, if I had it to do again, I would not donate to that campaign"), I'm willing to bet that the calls to remove him would have dropped in volume by a substantial margin. This isn't apples to apples, and it's not even apples to oranges. It's apples to pick up trucks.

Seriously. Eich not only failed to apologize in any meaningful manner (which I get is being spun by people as Integrity, Bro), but seemed to fail to even realize that the viewpoint he endorsed was so widely reviled by Mozilla's supporters.

The public is more than willing to forgive and understand if people are willing to explain their point of view, but he wouldn't even stoop to that.

Absolutely nothing good could come out of him trying to explain his views or his donation. It is good that he hasn't apologized out of pressure. He should only apologize if/when he actually has a change of heart on his position; not because an Internet mob holds him at gun point.

I completely agree.

The fact that he hasn't had a change of heart renders him unsuitable, in my opinion.

Whether or not you agree with it, this is the exact opposite of how an actually appropriate CEO appointee would behave.

I'll take an inappropriate CEO over an appropriate CEO that is willing to lie to the public just to pacify them and to keep his job.

Emphatically agreed. Like many a political scandal, this became a full-blown crisis not because of the original issue but because of how poorly Eich managed it. If Eich had -- like countless other public figures -- expressed a change in point of view on this issue, this would have blown over. As it stood, his recalcitrant stand on the issue was (and is) indefensible, the unwillingness to so much as discuss it was arrogant and the non-apology was patronizing -- but the inability to see how and why he was failing spoke to a much deeper incompetence. Eich is clearly not the stuff that CEOs are made of, and Mozilla as an organization is probably (ultimately) lucky to have figured that out so quickly.

I don't think you know what the word indefensible means. Clearly it is defensible to millions and millions of peopel. But you are too pompous and self-righteous to recognize the cowardice of your own position. Indeed, a hackernews is full of convenient, self-serving, image-crafted self-righteousness.

So, something like reiterating his involvement with Mozilla's stance on openness and inclusion (which includes gays), perhaps? Or how they had always been inclusive?

No. When you publicly take an abhorrent position, it is normally necessary to specifically repudiate that position to remove the doubt in people's minds. Generalities will not cut it.

> When you publicly take an abhorrent position

Donating to a cause and having the people against it sue to find out the backers (while giving assurances that no retribution is planned) is a very strange case to apply the word "publicly" to.

I don't understand why you chose to nitpick that word. Do you not believe that his stance is publicly known? That is all that matters for the rest of what I said. He would have to repudiate it specifically. His general statements are insufficient.

Because this appears to have been planned well in advance.

That lends support to the idea that no one would have believed him no matter what he had said.

What does? The boycott? You must be joking.

He donated to an anti-gay candidate, not to a campaign specifically against gays. This is akin to saying somebody an Iraq war supporter for paying US taxes.

Still, Cannon sounds like a reprehensible person, and I would be interested to hear Yagan's reason for helping to re-elect him.

No - the point is not "Let's hear Yagan's reason for donating" - the point is: why are we making political opinions an issue for tech CEOs?

Do we really want a world where where CEOs' personal political donations (from years past!) are sifted through to find the latest faux pas so we can pressure them to answer for themselves?

Not "political opinions," but "active participation in political movements."

And do you think tech is somehow exempt from this? It's hardly uncommon for CEOs to be subject to pressure because of their political views; doubly so in situations like this where they perform a significant non-commercial role.

So I'm actually pretty happy that CEOs are subject to public scrutiny.

It's interesting that you use the euphemism "political opinion" for oppression. The reason this was an issue for Mozilla was not because people have strongly held views on carbon permits vs. carbon taxes but because Eich went out of his way to help take rights away from an already oppressed group. This is truly disgusting behavior that many people (not just gays) rightfully wanted to distance themselves from. The fact that Mozilla draws most of its contributors from progressive engineers put the organization on the brink of an existential crisis, which is more than Eich could overcome with any of his technical plans as CEO, no matter how well thought out those technical plans might be. He had to fix that situation by admitting he was wrong. He didn't, making him an unsuitable CEO.

US taxes are required by law. Donating to reprehensible politicians isn't.

Except that paying taxes is compulsory, whereas selecting a politician to donate to is a choice.

Totally exactly the same thing. Candidate whom is anti-gay === targeted anti-gay legislation

Candidate was broadly anti gay. Prop 8 was a single specific marriage question. So no, not the same. Candidate was worse.

Does not follow. It's Utah, so his opponent could have been much worse…

The whole thing is so stupid to begin with, many of the people complaining about Eich are avid Obama supporters, someone who in 2008 was also campaigning against gay marriage, citing the exact same bigoted faith.

Everyone has a great hair splitting reason for why Eich is a horrible motherfucker for donating $1000 to prop 8, while Obama and Yagan are national heros for doing something ever so slightly different.

Obama didn't campaign against gay marriage. In fact, he stated his opposition to Proposition 8. http://m.sfgate.com/news/article/Obama-opposes-proposed-ban-...

His opponent was a supporter of Proposition 8, making Obama clearly the lesser evil on that issue. http://www.usnews.com/news/campaign-2008/articles/2008/06/27...

This is a disingenuous headline - Yagan donated to a candidate who was anti-gay (anti everything, really!) and NOT to a specific campaign designed to strip rights from people. There's a difference here.

This was obviously a PR stunt, in the sense that OKCupid would not have participated if they thought it would bring about negative reactions. But let's be realistic - at least 50% of anybody who's ever donated to a politician's campaign in the US has "donated to an anti gay campaign once", if that's the qualifier. And it's much harder to point a finger and say "you are demonstrably opposed to gay rights" when Yagan's company is making a public statement in support thereof - however hypocritical you perceive that to be.

This outlines the absurdity of what happens when you have to take down leaders just because their entire world view doesn't outline with yours.

Is it hypocritical of Yagan? Sure. Does it mean he's unqualified to do his job? Probably not.

This post from Arrington's original article is on point

> 5. Is it absurd to judge Yagan as a person based on a single donation, years ago, to a politician well known for waging war on gays? Yup. But that is precisely what Yagan and OkCupid did to Eich...How can a man orchestrate and support a boycott of Mozilla over Eich and yet donate to a hateful politician like Chris Cannon? How do you square that?

There are much better reasons not to use OKCupid than this silly fiasco. I'll let the post by OKCupid that they later removed explain:

http://static.izs.me/why-you-should-never-pay-for-online-dat...

If you think this is about just OKCupid, you're mistaken.

It's about what happens when you start applying micro-judgments arbitrarily that have no discernible relation to their qualifications that that have measured impacts on their livelihoods.

Here's the original post unearthing this from Uncrunched - http://uncrunched.com/2014/04/06/the-hypocrisy-of-sam-yagan-...

For progressive libertarians, hasn't Chris Cannon has been on the wrong side of many social issues, and on the right side of many privacy and internet issues?

Like Brendan Eich, you mean?

The point is not whether the act of supporting an anti gay marriage ballot measure is equivalent to voting for an anti-gay candidate - it isn't.

Rather, if Eich's small silent contribution to Prop 8 was such an unspeakable transgression that Yagan felt compelled to freaking mobilize a mass corporate boycott, then how in good conscience could he ever have elected a man with much more explicitly hateful views to represent him in Congress?

Actually two candidates against gay marriage, he also gave to Obama.

So what we should be saying is that Yagan only supports candidates who oppose gay marriage.

Seriously though, why not take a swing at eharmony's CEO? That guy makes Eich look like a bear.

Because he didn't come out & have an opinion on this debate?

Given that Americans live under a (generally) two-party system, which forces us to make a lot of "lesser of two evils" type choices, I don't think it's fair to hold anyone to all of the beliefs of political candidates that they support.

Edit: Also, we may not know about all of the political actions of those candidates, rather offering support based on their stances on a the few issues we currently think are most important.

It's not terribly shocking to learn that OkCupid's obvious publicity stunt against Brendan Eich was merely a publicity stunt.

Despite the differences in what happened this is still very disappointing. I hope he handles the situation better than Eich did whatever his politics are.

"There's a sucker born every minute"

You have just been pwnd by Barry Diller and Sam Yagan.

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