JTA Global News Service — Nov 29 — For all the nice Jewish boys looking for other nice Jewish boys – and nice Jewish lesbians looking for love – JDate.com has come to the rescue. The popular Jewish online dating site expanded its search capabilities this month to allow gay men and lesbians to seek matches. Gail Laguna, VP Communications, said the Web site's revision came at the request of many Jewish singles. In less than a month, 700 members have registered for same-sex searches.
Mark Brooks: Will be interesting to see which Christian focused site will follow suit? Bigchurch.com?? perhaps? Christian Mingle would be most likely as they are now owned by Spark Networks, parent of JDate. I can't see ChristianCafe.com going gay.
Mark, you are correct: ChristianCafe.com’s mission is to serve heterosexual Christians. 99% of our membership (conservative Christians, primarily) do not agree with the gay lifestyle, and neither do its owners. We don’t pass judgement – love the sinner, hate the sin; other than that, we have no comment. This is simply not a niche market we serve. We are happy to refer any to sites which could better cater to their needs (same as we do for other groups we don’t serve, e.g. Muslims or atheists, etc).
From a religious point of view, it is a definite no-go (not to mention it would be a business catastrophe if added).
BigChurch.com is owned by a company heavily into sex singles, including OutPersonals.com, so it wouldn’t be a surprise if they introduced gay and lesbians to their “Christian” site.
Spark, as you pointed out, is certainly into serving the gay market, but I am not sure that this would translate into adding the gay option to ChristianMingle.com. Their former owners (still involved, I think) are Mormons, who, while conservative Christians believe to be an apostate faith, are in agreement with us about the gay lifestyle.
How much influence they will continue to wield, now that they are part of Spark, is anyone’s guess. If they were smart, they would have insisted, as part of their acquisition deal, on a clause forever disallowing adding homosexuals to their site. Whether that was the case or not, of course, is likely only known between them and Spark.