OKCupid may be in the business of love, but the online dating site has anything but tender feelings for Mozilla and its newly-appointed CEO.

In a letter published Monday on OKCupid.com but viewable only to those who try to enter the site using a Mozilla Firefox Internet browser, the company called out CEO Brendan Eich’s past support of Proposition 8, a 2008 ballot initiative that aimed to ban same-sex marriage in California.

“Those who seek to deny love and instead enforce misery, shame, and frustration are our enemies,” the letter reads in part. “[W]e wish them nothing but failure.”

You can see a screengrab of OKCupid’s message if you click here, but we’ve also reproduced it in its entire below:

“Hello there, Mozilla Firefox user. Pardon this interruption of your OkCupid experience.

Mozilla’s new CEO, Brendan Eich, is an opponent of equal rights for gay couples. We would therefore prefer that our users not use Mozilla software to access OkCupid.

Politics is normally not the business of a website, and we all know there’s a lot more wrong with the world than misguided CEOs. So you might wonder why we’re asserting ourselves today. This is why: we’ve devoted the last ten years to bringing people—all people—together. If individuals like Mr. Eich had their way, then roughly 8% of the relationships we’ve worked so hard to bring about would be illegal. Equality for gay relationships is personally important to many of us here at OkCupid. But it’s professionally important to the entire company. OkCupid is for creating love. Those who seek to deny love and instead enforce misery, shame, and frustration are our enemies, and we wish them nothing but failure.”

OKCupid does provide Firefox users with a link through to the actual site at the bottom of the page, but nevertheless urges people to use alternate browsers:

In an statement emailed to The Huffington Post late Monday, Mozilla asserted that it is no way an anti-gay institution.

“Mozilla supports equality for all, including marriage equality for LGBT couples. No matter who you are or who you love, everyone deserves the same rights and to be treated equally,” a Mozilla spokesperson wrote. “OkCupid never reached out to us to let us know of their intentions, nor to confirm facts.”

Eich’s appointment as Mozilla’s new CEO last week led to an outcry among lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights advocates. At the heart of the criticism against Eich is a $1,000 donation the Mozilla co-founder and JavaScript inventor made in support of Proposition 8 six years ago.

In its letter to Firefox users, OKCupid wrote that while Eich’s contribution is six years in the past, “Mr. Eich’s boilerplate statements in the time since make it seem like he has the same views now as he did then.”

Eich himself last week addressed concerns about his “commitment to fostering equality and welcome for LGBT individuals at Mozilla” on his personal blog.

In it, he said:

“I am committed to ensuring that Mozilla is, and will remain, a place that includes and supports everyone, regardless of sexual orientation, gender identity, age, race, ethnicity, economic status, or religion.”

Harry Bradford of HuffPost Gay Voices contributed to this report.

An Alabama high school that previously banned same-sex couples from attending prom has reversed its policy after an outcry from students.

Earlier this week, it came to light that Greenville High School had said it would allow only “traditional couples” –- meaning a male and a female –- to attend prom, according to local outlet WSFA-TV.

Interim Superintendent Amy Bryan abolished the anti-gay policy soon after she learned of its existence. Had Mrs. Bryan known of the policy before it was given to students, then it would have never been an issue; however, the school administrator circumvented Mrs. Bryan in the decision process, issuing it without her knowledge or approval.

“An administrator issued a list of prom rules that included a discriminatory statement,” she said, per WSFA. “No one lost their right to go anywhere. It’s unfortunate it was in our rules, and all children will be welcome to the Junior-Senior Prom.”

Gay student Sarah Smith spoke to WAKA-TV about the issuing of the rule. “There was actually a straight girl sitting beside me, and she was getting more mad than I was about it. So that made me feel pretty good to know that somebody was on our side,” Smith said.

Smith helped bring the offensive policy to light via Facebook.

“Me and one of my friends, we actually got together and we actually wrote a post on Facebook and it just went from there. Today they [school administrators] lifted it [the ban], so we can pretty much take whoever we want to prom now, so we’re all excited about that,” she told WAKA on Wednesday.

Over the course of the past few years there have been a slew of controversies surrounding schools’ policies on prom couples. A group of residents in Sullivan, Ind., came under fire last year after proposing a “gay-free” prom that would take place outside of school. The local high school, on the other hand, allowed same-sex couples to attend the school’s official prom.

“We are conservative around here. That’s just the way of this town,” Nancy Woodard, who lives in Sullivan, told The Associated Press at the time. “In any town in this county, you’ll find four or five churches no matter how small the town. … The Bible is a big belief system here.”

It’s prom season and in conservative areas, there will be attempts at banning “non-traditional couple.” I, personally, am very proud of the immediate and swift actions took by Interim Superintendent Amy Bryan to abolish the policy. It shows that however backward Alabama politicians may be, there are still good people in Alabama who believe in equal rights.

Interesting the first gay couple known to attend a prom together was on May 30, 1980:

First American Gay Male Couple to Attend Senior Prom

Aaron Fricke was in his final year at the Cumberland (Rhode Island) High School when he publicly came out as gay. He asked Paul Guilbert to the senior prom (the school’s most important social dance event).

His principal prohibited their attendance, saying the move “upset other students, sent the community abuzz, and rallied out-of-state newspapers to consider the matter newsworthy.” It also earned Fricke five stitches under his eye when he was attacked in the hallway.

Fricke filed a lawsuit in Federal court with the help of the ACLU, charging that the school district was infringing on his first amendment right to free speech. “I feel I have the right to attend,” he told the judge. “I feel I want to go to the prom for the same reason any other student would want to go.”

The judge agreed (Fricke v. Lynch), and not only ordered the school district to allow the young gay couple to attend, but required the school to increase security in case there were any problems.

So, on May 30, 1980, Fricke and Guilbert attended the prom, and the judge’s decision inFricke v. Lynch became an important legal precedent. Fricke later wrote about his experiences in Reflections of a Rock Lobster: A Story about Growing Up Gay. He also collaborated with his father on another book, about coming out, entitled Sudden Strangers: The Story of a Gay Son and His Father.

I admit, I went to my prom with a girl, and I had a wonderful time. However, that was long before I had figured out the whole gay thing. Where I grew up (in Alabama, by the way), it was so completely unacceptable that it didn’t cross my mind until I was in college that I could be gay, and then it took a few years to work out all the feeling.

What was your prom experience like?

Researchers of what’s been deemed as “the first study to look at the consequences of anti-gay prejudice for mortality” have discovered that lesbian, gay and bisexual people living in less open-minded communities have a shorter life expectancy. GLB people who live in communities with high levels of antigay prejudice are more likely to have a life span that is 12 years shorter than their peers who are not discriminated against.

Researchers at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health released a study, which was published online in the Social Science & Medicine journal, which identified a way to measure a community’s level of discrimination, beginning in 1988. The information was then linked to death rates form the National Death Index, over a 20-year span.

“Our findings indicate that sexual minorities living in communities with higher levels of prejudice die sooner than sexual minorities living in low-prejudice communities, and that these effects are independent of established risk factors for mortality, including household income, education, gender, ethnicity, and age, as well as the average income and education level of residents in the communities where the respondents lived,” the study’s lead author, Mark Hatzenbuehler, PhD and an assistant professor of Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, is quoted in a press release as saying. “In fact,” Hatzenbuehler said, “our results for prejudice were comparable to life expectancy differences that have been observed between individuals with and without a high school education.”

Results showed that 92% of LGB respondents living in low-prejudice communities were still alive. In contrast, only 78% of the LGB respondents living in high-prejudice communities were still alive, according to the study’s authors.

The deaths could largely be attributed to suicide, homicide, and cardiovascular diseases in the high-prejudice communities. LGB people were also more prone to commit suicide at a younger average age (37.5) than those in more welcoming communities (55.7). Still, violent deaths are more likely in more homophobic areas, where the homicide rates are at least three times higher.

Meanwhile, a quarter of deaths in high-prejudice areas were attributable to cardiovascular disease.

“Psychosocial stressors are strongly linked to cardiovascular risk, and this kind of stress may represent an indirect pathway through which prejudice contributes to mortality,” Hatzenbuehler said. “Discrimination, prejudice, and social marginalization create several unique demands on stigmatized individuals that are stress-inducing.”

Considering that I live in Alabama, this does not bode well for my long term health. I think I need to start looking harder for a new job in a more accepting area.