Google to Pay Homosexual Staff More than Heterosexual Employees

July 5, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A news release from Google says that the mega-search engine company will begin paying its homosexual employees more than their heterosexual counterparts.

Citing a tax law that says health insurance benefits paid to civil partners of homosexual employees are considered taxable income, while benefits provided to married spouses are not taxed, Google announced it will rectify the tax "discrimination" against homosexuals by paying them the difference.

On average an extra $1,069 per year will be given to homosexuals, according to a NY Times report.

The company said on its blog Thursday, that it will be “grossing-up imputed taxes on health insurance benefits for all same-sex domestic partners in the United States, retroactive to January 1, 2010.”

Google is well known for its endorsement of homosexuality and already has parental leave for homosexuals equivalent to the Family and Medical Leave Act; it is working with its insurers to change the definition of infertility - now defined as the inability to conceive a child after trying for one year - in order to have employee health benefits cover artificial insemination for lesbians.

It was reported that the company made the move in response to complaints from homosexual employees that they were discriminated against by the tax system.

"We said, 'You're right, that doesn't seem fair,' so we looked into it," Google Personnel chief Laszlo Bock told the New York Times. "From that initial suggestion, we said, let's take a look at all the benefits we offer and see if we are being truly fair across the board."

Daryl Herrschaft, director of the Workplace Project at Human Rights Campaign, a homosexual rights advocacy group, applauded Google's new policy.

"They're picking up the slack where the federal government hasn't recognized the reality of diversity in the workforce today," Herrschaft told the media.

"This is eliminating existing discrimination that ... gays and lesbians face in the workplace as a result of federal law that doesn’t acknowledge their families."

However, Focus on the Family spokesman Gary Schneeberger told FoxNews.com that the extra pay given to homosexuals is actually reverse discrimination and does nothing to equalize benefits to employees.

“If Google wants to be truly fair to its employees, it should consider extra compensation to married heterosexuals who are bitten every April 15 by the marriage-penalty tax,” Schneeberger said.

“How is offering more money to only one group to offset a perceived inequity not a form of discrimination against those groups not fortunate enough to receive such bonuses?”

Furthermore, Fox News legal analyst Lis Wiehl said Google's move could open the way for a reverse discrimination lawsuit against the company based on infringement of the statute of equal pay for equal work, and giving preference to benefits based on sexual orientation.

“There’s a potential for a reverse discrimination suit because of the equal pay for equal work statute which says that if I’m doing the same job as the person next to me that my marital status or sexual orientation shouldn’t be taken into consideration. It’s my work performance that should be taken into consideration,” Wiehl told FoxNews.com.

Contact info:
Eric Schmidt, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer
Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043
Phone: +1 650-253-0000
Fax: +1 650-253-0001
Email: (via website)

Google Toronto
10 Dundas Street East
Suite 600
Toronto, Ontario M5B 2G9
Phone: +1 416-915-8200
Fax: +1 416-915-8201

Hmmmm..if it works, why do I still get this when searching:

"July 1, 2010: Here we go again... We regret to announce that our Google scraper may have to be permanently retired, thanks to a change at Google. It depends on whether Google is willing to restore the simple interface that we've been scraping since Scroogle started five years ago. Actually, we've been using that interface for scraping since Google-Watch.org began in 2002. This interface (here's a sample from years ago) was remarkably stable all that time. During those eight years there were only about five changes that required some programming adjustments. Also, this interface was available at every Google data center in exactly the same form, which allowed us to use 700 IP addresses for Google. That interface was at www.google.com/ie but on May 10, 2010 they took it down and inserted a redirect to /toolbar/ie8/sidebar.html. It used to have a search box, and the results it showed were generic during that entire time. It didn't show the snippets unless you moused-over the links it produced (they were there for our program, so that was okay), and it has never had any ads. Our impression was that these results were from Google's basic algorithms, and that extra features and ads were added on top of these generic results. Three years ago Google launched "Universal Search," which meant that they added results from other Google services on their pages. But this simple interface we were using was not affected at all. It is not possible to continue Scroogle unless we have a simple interface that is stable. Google's main consumer-oriented interface that they want everyone to use is too complex, too bloated, and changes too frequently, to make our scraping operation possible. After a lot of suggestions from Scroogle users, and a fair amount of publicity, we found a fix and Scroogle was back in 24 hours. This fix was to insert an extra parameter, &output=ie, into the search terms that were relayed to Google. The extra parameter recovered the same interface that we thought was gone forever. Now it seems like it actually might be gone forever. Late on June 30, 2010, the results produced while using this parameter began to shift to the usual busy Google interface with ads and a left-margin sidebar. Scroogle users saw a Scroogle page that said, "Google returned no results for this search," when in fact Google returned results but our scraper was unable to deal with them. Over the next few days we will attempt to contact Google and determine whether the old interface is gone as a matter of policy at Google, or if they simply have it hidden somewhere and will tell us where it is so that we can continue to use it. Thank you for your support during these past five years. Check back in a week or so; if we don't hear from Google by next week, I think we can all assume that Google would rather have no Scroogle, and no privacy for searchers. — Daniel Brandt, Public Information Research, scroogle AT lavabit.com "

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