Google's New Goal: Gay Marriage Legal World Wide

via Google Wants to Legalize Same Sex Marriage Worldwide – National – The Atlantic Wire.

Bravo, Google. The tech giant announced a new campaign to legalize same sex marriage across the world at an LGBT conference on Saturday. Pointed out to us by Think Progress, Dot429 reports Google’s Mark Palmer-Edgecumbe announced the “Legalize Love” campaign at an LGBT Workplace Summit in London on Saturday. The initiative starts in Singapore and Poland, but will eventually expand to every country that has a Google office. The idea is to “focus on places with homophobic cultures, where anti-gay laws exist,” before expanding into more liberal countries.

Palmer-Edgecumbe explained why Singapore is a good place for the company to start their campaign. “Singapore wants to be a global financial center and world leader and we can push them on the fact that being a global center and a world leader means you have to treat all people the same, irrespective of their sexual orientation,” he said.

In some instances, he said Google hasn’t been able to employ the best person for the job because of some countries anti-gay culture. “We have had a number of instances where we have been trying to hire people into countries where there are these issues and have been unable to put the best person into a job in that country,” he explained.

I wonder if I actually googled where in the world the most homophobic cultures and anti-gay laws existed what it would say. First result is Wikipedia: LGBT rights by country or territory.

Singapore: “Male illegal (Penalty: up to 2 years prison sentence; no plan to repeal 377A and not enforced since 1999)”

Male homosexuality as punishable with jail time is not acceptable but at least it hasn’t been enforced in a decade. So consider that some measure of progress.

Meanwhile in Saudi Arabia and much of the rest of the Muslim world:

Illegal (Penalty: death or prison/fines/whipping)

Google’s famous mantra is “Don’t be evil.”

Question: is it evil to focus people’s attention and money on fighting the minor evil of Singapore’s unenforced sodomy law while ignoring the far more significant evils of Saudi Arabia’s ongoing executions of gays, sorcerers, “dishonored” women, and Muslim apostates?

And where does Google MENA (Middle East and North Africa) fit in with this campaign?

Recommended reading: Mitchell Bard’s The Arab Lobby.