So, I was pretty upset the other day when I found that OKCupid was telling Firefox users to switch to another browser to protest Firefox's appointment of a new CEO who had once donated money to an anti-gay marriage initiative.

I'm not one of those "traditional values" people - it'd be pretty hypocritical if I were, seeing as I'm polyamorous and dating a transgender person. I just don't like the idea that people's suitability for jobs should be based on their privately-held opinions rather than on merit.

I was going to delete my OKCupid account and write the company an angry letter with lots of exclamation marks and capital letters. But then I realized that would border on hypocrisy, plus be super boring.

So instead, I am turning this into a protest account, so that all the available women ages 25-35 within a ten mile radius of Random Suburb, Michigan can see how angry I am!

I work in a Catholic hospital. Not just one of those ordinary hospitals that sticks a St. in front of the name, but a really Catholic hospital. Some of my co-workers are nuns.

This is relevant, because I'm a pro-choice atheist. The nuns are pretty nice about this and have never asked me about it. Certainly they've never given me any grief. It would be easy for them to find out if they wanted to, but I think their philosophy is that ideological purity matters less than my ability to provide good care to patients.

I have a huge amount of respect for that, and a huge amount of respect for our society for enforcing that as the standard. And I have a corresponding amount of disgust at OKCupid for trying to undermine that standard.

When you're being out-tolerated by the frickin' Catholics, you need to reconsider some of your life choices.

Being accepting of other people's differing political opinions.

Here's the way I think of it. I could boycott every company owned by a Republican. And then the Republicans would boycott every company owned by a Democrat. That wouldn't change the course of national politics - there would be equal pressure from both sides.

But it would have a chilling effect on whether anyone who wanted to be employed could express a political opinion, or donate to any cause, or contradict popular opinion in any way. And the strongest effect would be on unpopular people - like atheists, or polyamorists, or minorities. If all the monogamous people boycott anyone who's poly, and all the poly people boycott anyone who's monogamous, this is going to turn out a heck of a lot better for the monogamous people.

People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. And anyone who doesn't totally conform with the majority is living in a glass house here.

I seem to be some kind of crazy ideologue!

And I promise, when I'm not writing protest profiles, that's not true. I voted for Obama, just like everyone else. Back when I was in California, I voted against Prop 8. I'm not even a libertarian, or at least not one of THOSE libertarians - in fact I wrote one of the more definitive resources for people arguing against libertarians online, one that's gotten tens of thousands of hits.

I just think this one thing is a really really bad precedent.

I could go on forever about my favorite books, but I have to admit I spend at least as much time reading blogs. So here are some of my favorite bloggers and a writing sample of each:

Andrew Sullivan: "After an OKCupid decision to boycott Mozilla, the recently appointed Brendan Eich just resigned under pressure. The whole episode disgusts me – as it should disgust anyone interested in a tolerant and diverse society. If this is the gay rights movement today – hounding our opponents with a fanaticism more like the religious right than anyone else – then count me out. If we are about intimidating the free speech of others, we are no better than the anti-gay bullies who came before us."

Alas, A Blog: "OKCupid is in the wrong. Note that they are not asking that Mozilla change any specific corporate policies; rather, they are saying that no one who disagrees with them in private life about SSM should be CEO. This isn’t working to create real, positive change; it’s an attempt to economically punish Eich for disagreeing with them. “We wish them nothing but failure” is not a generous sentiment."

The Atlantic: "The backlash against Mozilla included a widely discussed block on Firefox browsers by the dating site OKCupid, which asked users to switch their choice of Web browsers to show their support for gay marriage. [But] it isn't difficult to see the wisdom in inculcating the norm that the political and the professional are separate realms, for following it makes so many people and institutions better off in a diverse, pluralistic society. The contrary approach would certainly have a chilling effect on political speech and civic participation, as does Mozilla's behavior toward Eich. Its implications are particularly worrisome because whatever you think of gay marriage, the general practice of punishing people in business for bygone political donations is most likely to entrench powerful interests and weaken the ability of the powerless to challenge the status quo. "

Marginal Revolution: "As a supporter of gay marriage I very much agree [that Eich should not have been forced to resign]. I see such such ideological witch hunts as unjust, counterproductive, and stifling of free discourse."

The free marketplace of ideas. I have some pretty crazy opinions - that like the US should provide a Basic Income Guarantee of a certain fixed amount of money to all its adult citizens, regardless of whether or not they're employed. I know it's not popular and that I've got an uphill battle convincing other people it's a good idea, but I'm glad that people express their disagreement with me through arguments and occasional loud sighs, rather than through trying to get me fired or getting people to boycott my employer.

Religious tolerance. I'm an atheist myself, but one of my friends is a Quaker. Her religion says she's not allowed to support any wars. Quakers had a history of being persecuted because of this, thought of as second-class citizens. Well, I think Quakerism is silly, and there are probably some wars we need to be in. But the compromise we came up with - we go to war when the majority wants it, Quakers don't have to like it, Quakers get the chance to do some kind of community service instead of being drafted into the army - seems like the fairest solution. In other words, don't let religious people dictate our policy, but don't punish them for sticking to their faith in hard places either.

Friends from everywhere on the political spectrum. When I was growing up, my best friend's father was a Republican. My rabbi in college was a conservative Jew who had very strong feelings about Israel; now some of my friends are Muslims who have very strong feelings about Palestine. An old professor was a Communist, and I went to school with the daughter of Leonard Peikoff, who heads the Ayn Rand Institute. All of these people were good people, I learned a lot from all of them, and it's pretty neat to be able to live in a society where they're not all at one another's throats trying to get each other fired or put in jail.

Forgiveness. I did some crazy things back when I was younger, some of them as recently as 2008. I wouldn't want my entire fitness as a human being judged by one of them dredged up by a reporter.

Doubt. Voltaire said that "doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd." There are a lot of principles I hold pretty strongly, but not so many I'm so certain of that I think people who disagree with them deserve to be hurt.

Javascript. It's a pretty cool language. Must've been someone really clever who thought it up.

How the CEO of OKCupid's parent company (and founder of OKCupid) donated $500 to the campaign of Congressman Chris Cannon in 2004. Cannon is an extraordinarily anti-gay Utah Republican who received a 0% rating from the Human Rights Campaign, a group that rates legislators on their support for LGBT issues. While in office, Cannon voted yes for a ban gay adoptions, voted no on a bill to prohibit job discrimination based on sexual orientation, and supported a Constitutional amendment banning gay marriage nationwide.

So apparently OKCupid thinks it's okay to organize a boycott against a company whose CEO donated $1,000 to bigots. Because they have the moral high ground. Because their CEO only donated a mere $500 to bigots.

Seriously, I spend a lot of time thinking about this. HOW DOES THAT MAKE SENSE TO PEOPLE??!

Hanging out, spending time with friends, reading blogs on my computer, or otherwise having fun without organizing a boycott of someone for the exact same thing I myself did four years earlier.

I actually really really love OKCupid.

It is a great service, it's head and shoulders above any of the other dating services out there, and it's the way I met my first girlfriend.

But I really really love Firefox too. It freed me from having to use Internet Explorer, which was about as big a positive life change as losing my virginity.

And that's exactly the thing. I think people should be free to appreciate great products without having to do ideological litmus tests on each of their employees' private beliefs. Right now OKCupid is trying to undermine that. That's not going to change anyone's mind about politics, but it does risk a future where I get to use great websites like this less often.

You have some kind of weird fetish for people who protest decisions made by online dating sites.

Must enjoy long walks on the beach during which we talk about nothing except how cowardly OKCupid's decision was.

Also, you should know that my girlfriend's response upon seeing this was: "Anyone who reads this and goes 'I should date this guy' is a keeper, and I want them to be the third person in our triad."