OkCupid's Sam Yagan Breaks His Silence

OkCupid and its co-founder Sam Yagan have gone silent on Twitter ever since they succeeded in getting Brendan Eich ousted from Mozilla. In the week since then, we and others have taken a look at OkCupid’s board members’ political donations. It turns out that Yagan himself donated to Republican Rep. Chris Cannon of Utah. Cannon had consistently voted against gay marriage at the time — as had most members of Congress, in both parties. Support for gay marriage is a relatively recent development, so recent that President Barack Obama didn’t even evolve on the issue until 2012, at a time when he needed to shore up his party’s leftwing base so that could be re-elected. In 2008, when Obama sought a broader electoral coalition and wanted to present himself as a moderate, he clearly told Pastor Rick Warren that he opposed gay marriage.

Yagan had donated money to Obama and the Democrats as well, both of which were opposed to gay marriage at the time he made the donations.

Yagan has broken his silence, in a statement that he emailed to the Huffington Post. He claims ignorance over the Cannon donation.

A decade ago, I made a contribution to Representative Chris Cannon because he was the ranking Republican on the House subcommittee that oversaw the Internet and Intellectual Property, matters important to my business and our industry. I accept responsibility for not knowing where he stood on gay rights in particular; I unequivocally support marriage equality and I would not make that contribution again today. However, a contribution made to a candidate with views on hundreds of issues has no equivalence to a contribution supporting Prop 8, a single issue that has no purpose other than to affirmatively prohibit gay marriage, which I believe is a basic civil right.

Yagan remains unapologetic about harassing a man out of a job because that man held a majority view a few years ago, and a view that still commands around half support in polls, and still wins outright when put to a vote, and has been around for thousands of years. Yagan remains unapologetic about launching a lynch mob action.