This one comes straight out of the totally ridiculous lawsuit file:

A Northern California woman sued the online dating service eHarmony on Thursday, alleging it discriminates against gays, lesbians and bisexuals. Linda Carlson said she tried to use the Internet site in February but could not based on her sexual orientation. When Carlson wrote to eHarmony to complain, the company refused to change its policy, according to the lawsuit filed on her behalf in Los Angeles County Superior Court. The lawsuit claims that by only offering to find a compatible match for men seeking women or women seeking men, the company was violating state law barring discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. “Such outright discrimination is hurtful and disappointing for a business open to the public in this day and age,” Carlson said in a statement. The suit names Pasadena-based eHarmony, company founder Neil Clark Warren and his wife Marylyn, the company’s former vice president, as defendants. It seeks class action status, a jury trial and unspecified damages.

Of course it does. In it’s defense, EHarmony points out that it’s system is based on specific research that only included opposite-sex couples:

“The research that eHarmony has developed, through years of research, to match couples has been based on traits and personality patterns of successful heterosexual marriages,” a company statement said. “Nothing precludes us from providing same-sex matching in the future, it’s just not a service we offer now based upon the research we have conducted,” the statement said.

Over at The Volokh Conspiracy, Dale Carpenter points out just how this lawsuit reveals the pernicious ways in which anti-discrmination laws are being applied by Courts today:

Modern antidiscrimination law is expanding in two ways that I think are very unhelpful. First, it is being applied in ways that infringe important liberties outside the commercial context. The Boy Scouts case, involving the exclusion of an openly gay scoutmaster, was an example of this. While the harm and indignity done to the gay scoutmaster, who’d been an eagle scout, was not trivial, requiring that the Boy Scouts let him lead troops violated the Scouts’ associational and speech interests in very important ways. Second, antidiscrimination law is increasingly being applied to trivial and/or pretty harmless discrimination that goes well beyond core concerns about things like employment and housing. The exclusion of Catholic Charities from offering adoptions in Massachusetts was unjustified because it was difficult to show how the group’s anti-gay policy actually hurt gay couples seeking to adopt. The eHarmony suit is an example of the trivialization of antidiscrimination law. It doesn’t involve a core concern like employment or housing or even a traditional public accommodation. It’s also very hard to see how any gay person is really harmed by the policy. Gays aren’t lacking for match-making sites, either general ones or those tailored just to same-sex pairs. And personally, I wouldn’t give my money to eHarmony regardless of what policy they adopt at this point.

But there is an an even more important point to consider here. Why should eHarmony be forced to provide specific services to a specific group of people. Whether you agree with their approach to online dating or not — and I should disclose at this point that my wife Kellie and I originally met on eHarmony back in February 2003 — it is their approach and their business.

If you don’t like it, don’t give them you’re money and go somewhere else. But that is not the solution that comes to the mind of people who live with the mentality of a victim. Instead of being an adult about it, they go crying to a lawyer and looking for someone to sue.

Pretty sad if you ask me.

Update: KipEsquire addresses this lawsuit at A Stitch In Haste and makes a very good a point:

The lawsuit was filed in California, apparently under that state’s over-reaching Unruh Civil Rights Act: 51.5. No business establishment of any kind whatsoever shall discriminate against, boycott or blacklist, or refuse to buy from, contract with, sell to, or trade with any person in this state on account of any characteristic listed or defined[.] California’s Civil Rights Act of 2005 added sexual orientation to the list of protected classes. So, as I tried to explain in this post about another widely lambasted Unruh lawsuit, it is all-important to distinguish between insisting that the eHarmony litigation is “silly,” “misguided,” “petty” or any similar word (which may well be the case), and claiming that it is “frivolous” (which is simply not the case). Under the plain language of California law, this is obviously not a frivolous lawsuit. If anything, it is the Unruh Act that is frivolous.

In other words, not only isn’t the lawsuit frivolous, thanks to California law the Plaintiff may actually have a chance to succeed. If anything, that makes this entire silly episode even more distressing.