Official Google Blog: Supporting equality???
Official Google Blog: Supporting equality
This is when I am ashamed to be such a big fan of Google. Same-sex marriage is not a "fundamental right" - it is a redefinition of the concept of marriage that is at odds with the understanding of marriage held by every major religious tradition and most historical cultures. It has nothing to do with hiring or search or equality: being denied the right to call their same-sex union a "marriage" will not make Google's employees significantly less efficient; Google's stance on this issue seriously compromises the neutrality that I would expect a company committed to internet search would be concerned to maintain; and, as a secular company, Google has no special expertise to offer on the important moral and cultural question of whether or not allowing same-sex unions to be called "marriages" is a question of "equality" or merely a matter of personal preference.
Please, Google, concentrate on what you do best: providing quick, unbiased search results in an internet-friendly fashion. And if you are really committed to equality and to not being evil (both good things!), please allow for the possibility that there might be some truth in the religious traditions and philosophical beliefs that have lead so many to object to such a radical redefinition of marriage.
posted by eHewlett
2 comments
2 Comments:
To clarify the intent of this post, while developing it in two different directions...
1) My main intent in the post was to point out that Google, as an organization, has no special expertise that qualifies it to intervene as an expert in this sort of moral question - in fact, its area of expertise should prompt it to stay neutral in such a question. The feeling of betrayal/disappointment that led to the emotional overtones in the post comes from my partiality to Google based partly on its track-record as a good internet citizen and partly on its public committment to "not be evil" (though there is admittedly a partial inconsistency in the second part of this reaction).
2) I did not intend, in my original post, to address the larger question of whether or not the lifelong committment of two same-sex partners is better or worse than the have-sex-with-whomever-you-please approach which seems to be more common in the homosexual community. In fact, I suspect that, in most cases, a life-long committment of a same-sex couple to one another would be healthier than the casual-sex alternative. This is, however, a different question from the issue of whether or not such a committment should be recognized by society as a "marriage". And even acknowledging that there might be more of real love in such a committed relationship still does not address the question of whether or not the sexualization of same-sex relationships is intrinsically unhealthy (which, of course, I suspect to be the case). But both of these are much larger questions, more worthy of an essay or even a book than of an off-the-cuff blog post.
So very well said.
On a related topic, why is homosexuality so widely promoted when the other sexual perversions are not? Hey Google, are you going to continue to discriminate against bigamists, NAMBLA, etc.? On what grounds?
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