A narrative is emerging that the entire Brendan Eich evisceration campaign was a public relations stunt by OKCupid. That narrative is emerging from the left, based on facts uncovered by the right.
Chuck Ross of The Daily Caller was the first to report that the founder of OKCupid, who also is the CEO of Match.com, donated many years ago to an anti-gay marriage congressman:
Sam Yagan, who is currently CEO of the Match Group, which controls OkCupid, donated $500 to Barack Obama in 2007 and 2008 back when he still opposed gay marriage.While president of the tech company Metamachine, Yagan also gave $500 to Republican Utah Rep. Chris Cannon. In 2006 Cannon voted in favor of the Marriage Protection Amendment, which would have defined marriage as a union between a man and a woman in the Constitution.
Uncrunched picks up on that theme, The Hypocrisy Of Sam Yagan & OkCupid, listing numerous reasons for the thesis that “This was a PR stunt … nothing but a PR stunt,” including (linking to Ross at The Daily Caller):
3. And yet Sam Yagan made a $500 donation to U.S. Congressman Chris Cannon in 2004.
Mother Jones now has jumped on Ross’ revelation of the campaign donation, without linking to or mentioning Ross or The Daily Caller, OkCupid’s CEO Donated to an Anti-Gay Campaign Once, Too:
But there’s a hitch: 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….Combine that with the fact that the company helped force out one tech CEO for something its own CEO also did, and its action last week starts to look more like a PR stunt than an impassioned act of protest
So when does the boycott of OKCupid start? After all, the people who took down Eich did so based on the, ahem, purest of principled judgments.
Andrew Sullivan sure is looking good right now.
Related: Before Brendan Eich, they came for the Mormons
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