Surprise! OkCupid's Board Includes At Least Two Democrat Donors

OkCupid launched the campaign against Brendan Eich at Mozilla. Today, the White House declined to give an opinion on whether Mr. Eich ought to have become unemployable for holding a position that Barack Obama held at the same time.

Perhaps the question should be re-asked on Monday.

Here is the OkCupid board of founders. They are, from left to right, Chris Coyne, Sam Yagan, Max Krohn and Christian Rudder.

Given the nature of the current debate, Mr. Rudder would be well advised to just have people call him “Chris.”

A quick donor look-up on OpenSecrets.org is revealing. Two of the four founders have donated money to political operations in recent years. Both donors gave money on a similar scale to Brendan Eich, the man they are responsible for getting ousted at a company they don’t even work for and is not a rival of their company. In fact, Eich developed a tool that OkCupid probably could not exist without.

According to OpenSecrets, Mr. Yagan donated to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign twice, once in 2007 and once in 2008. Humor Rainbow used to own OkCupid.

At the time Yagan made both donations, Barack Obama was publicly opposed to same-sex marriage.

OkCupid’s other political donor appears to be Max Krohn. According to OpenSecrets, Krohn donated to the Democratic National Committee twice in 2004.

Circumstantial evidence suggests that this Maxwell Krohn is the same one who co-founded OkCupid. Note that he lists MIT as his employer. OkCupid’s Max Krohn was a grad student at MIT from 2003, and co-founded OkCupid in 2004.

At that point, 2004, the Democratic Party as a whole opposed same-sex marriage. The majority of Democrats in Congress, and President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, had passed and signed the Defense of Marriage Act, which supposedly enshrined the traditional definition of marriage into federal law.

Let’s throw this in just for irony’s sake.

Mr. Zhi did not come up in an OpenSecrets record search. I have no idea what his politics are, or if he even has any. But he works for a company that wanted strangers to quit using Firefox because Brendan Eich was Mozilla’s CEO. Well, Brendan Eich invented JavaScript.

For consistency’s sake, shouldn’t OkCupid demand that Morley Zhi and anyone else who works for their dating site stop using JavaScript immediately?

Or was this whole thing just a game to them?

Evidently, whatever the game is, it goes on even after OkCupid have kicked Eich’s head around.

We are pleased that OkCupid’s boycott has brought tremendous awareness to the critical matter of equal rights for all partnerships.

— OkCupid (@okcupid) April 3, 2014

Today’s decision reaffirms Mozilla’s commitment to that cause. We are satisfied that Mozilla will be taking a number of further steps.

— OkCupid (@okcupid) April 3, 2014