Google is being criticized by social
conservatives for backing a global campaign against discrimination in
the workplace.
Google's Legalize Love campaign
was announced at Out & Equal's Global LGBT Workplace Summit 2012,
which ended Saturday in London.
“Legalize Love is a campaign
to promote safer conditions for gay and lesbian people inside and
outside the office in countries with anti-gay laws on the books,” a
spokesperson for the Internet search giant told The Washington
Post.
The campaign will first launch in
Poland and Singapore. Organizers plan to expand the campaign to
every country where Google has an office, focusing on countries where
anti-gay sentiment runs high.
The Christian conservative group
American Family Association (AFA) said a Google boycott “is going
to be a hard one for a lot of us,” and would “test the meat of
our convictions.”
“A lot of us are so integrated into
Google and Google products, this is going to be a tough one,”
Buster Wilson, general manager of the AFA's radio network, told
listeners. “It's more than just a search engine. Many of us have
Android phones. The Android system is a Google product. Many of us
use Google calendar, Google task and GMail, and all those kinds of
things. YouTube and all the other things; it's not just the search
engine.”
“Google: out there pushing for
same-sex equality,” Wilson
lamented.
Wilson made no mention of the fact that
Microsoft, which owns search engine Bing and Android rival Windows
Phone, also supports marriage equality.
(Related: Microsoft's
Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer support Washington gay marriage.)