Full of holiday goodwill, the online dating service Chemistry.com released the first in a series of post-Christmas ads last week it hopes will paint competitor eHarmony as “out of sync with what is happening in America” — principally for its policy of not matching up gays.

Struggling for a time, Chemistry.com has now embraced its raison d’être as the anti-eHarmony, carving out a niche by appealing to those turned away by the Internet’s largest online matchmaker. The ads “attack eHarmony for refusing to match people of the same gender and for the evangelical Christian beliefs of its founder, Dr. Neil Clark Warren,” The New York Times reported.

Chemistry.com’s message seems to ignore Warren’s enormous success with eHarmony by suggesting its less popular anything-goes ideology better reflects Americans’ values. The new ads conflate eHarmony’s heterosexual-only services with wild hypotheticals — by imagining one scenario in which that policy has led a motel to declare on its marquee: “No premarital sex” (in lieu of “No vacancy”). Or another in which gays’ civil liberties are curtailed at the beach, where a sign reads inhospitably: “No gays on beach, May-September.”

Many Americans remember Chemistry.com’s $20 million anti-eHarmony TV ad campaign that began last fall. The commercials, which always end with “Rejected by eHarmony” stamped in red across the screen, feature people who are unfairly turned away for various reasons — most egregiously, in Chemistry.com’s book, for being gay. The message is working: The Times notes that Chemistry.com experienced an 80 percent growth after the ads began. Gay and lesbian enrollment is up by 200 percent, suddenly comprising 10 percent of its membership.

And Warren, who appears on Focus on the Family radio programming and was once a dean at Fuller Theological Seminary, has been attacked frequently in the media for being discriminatory and for his evangelical Christian beliefs (like that premarital sex “clouds” a person’s decision about whom to marry). He’s begun a semi-backpedal recently, explaining that he actually doesn’t know enough about gay and lesbian relationships to do same-sex matching (versus refuses to match gay couples because he opposes it morally), that the site’s users run the religious gamut from Wiccan to atheist and that there’s more to it than just rejecting gays: Others are rejected because they are under the 21-year-old age limit, lie on their personality tests, appear emotionally unstable or have other problems.

EHarmony’s mission statement is about empowering its users “to grow and strengthen their most important relationships for a lifetime of happiness,” which in Warren’s biblical worldview means marriage. Since same-sex marriage is illegal in most states, he says in defense, why even offer that option? The numbers say he doesn’t need to: eHarmony is like Gulliver in the online dating world of Lilliput. Its 17 million users outnumber Chemistry.com’s by 4-to-1, and Warren’s “out of sync” system — codified in several bestsellers like Finding the Love of Your Life — in fact appears popular as ever.