About

The Beginning of Sunrise123.org was when ProCon.org was founded by Steven (Steve) C. Markoff in 2004. ProCon.org started as a website dedicated to finding and posting the best, and sourced, pros and cons of controversial social, political, sports and other issues, covering a variety of topics. Those topics ranged from illegal immigration to medical marijuana to presidential elections.

Due to the fidelity of posting the best pro and cons on its topics, giving no mind to the personal political or other views of staff or leadership, and in part due to its substantial traffic (over 15 million visits a year, in the last three years of its existence), in 2020, ProCon.org was acquired by Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. (“Britannica”), the for-profit company that has produced politically neutral content for over 250 years. As part of the acquisition agreement, Britannica agreed to keep the ProCon.org site free for 25 years, although they also negotiated the right to monetize the site’s content when it took a deeper dive into the relevant issues. [ProCon.org continues as a wonderful resource. Check it out!]

The Britannica acquisition included only the content of ProCon.org, leaving its nonprofit organization in place. With its lack of content, and the pros and cons taken over by Britannica, little was done with the 501(c)(3) nonprofit other than keeping the needed corporate records and government reporting up to date until December, 2022, when the ProCon.org organization was given a seven-figure donation to continue its nonprofit work. On 06/20/2023 the name of the organization, ProCon.org, was changed to Sunrise123.org. 

Sunrise123.org, since mid year 2023,  began posting interesting and sourced information on the categories many people have said should not be brought up at a dinner party, for fear of alienating some (or all) of the guests. These prohibited topics are generally thought to be Politics, Religion and Sex.