You have to hand it to Google’s founders: having vowed when they took the company public to make the world a better place, Sergey Brin and Larry Page are not afraid to wrestle with the social implications, even if it takes them in territory that corporate executives generally shun (for good reason – it’s not always wise to take a public stance on something that will antagonise at least part of the workforce.)
Sergey Brin admits in a company blog post that the November ballot proposal in California to ban gay marriage is an “unlikely question” for Google to take a public position. He goes on:
However, while there are many objections to this proposition — further government encroachment on personal lives, ambiguously written text — it is the chilling and discriminatory effect of the proposition on many of our employees that brings Google to publicly oppose Proposition 8. While we respect the strongly-held beliefs that people have on both sides of this argument, we see this fundamentally as an issue of equality. We hope that California voters will vote no on Proposition 8 — we should not eliminate anyone’s fundamental rights, whatever their sexuality, to marry the person they love.
