Doug Powers using Google more than Yahoo!

i don't normally do this, but for some reason, the sheer idiocy and the purposefully (i assume) deceitful hand-waving of this article has got me riled up. for the record, i am not a gay googler, nor do i know any gay googlers. actually, i probably do, but it's not like they come out to me.

Anyhow, as a practitioner of logic, not to mention a fan of google, this crap offends me.

Google to Pay Heterosexuals Less Than Homosexuals

Where to begin? How about with the headline? Is there proof that this is the case? If the heterosexuals are all making X, and the homosexuals are making X-$2 and just received a $1 raise, they are still not making as much as the heterosexuals. Is this what actually happened? Who knows? Google's salary statistics are not public knowledge, so there's no way to make the conclusion contained in the post's title.

Digging a little deeper, the benefit applies to Domestic Partners, not explicitly to gay people. Framing this as gays vs straights is false to begin with, since domestic partners in California are not necessarily gay.

I'm a little punchy after a day of listening to Elena Kagan doing her best impression of the love child of Betty Friedan and Nathan Thurm

Okay, I don't know who those people are and I don't care to look them up. Well, I know who Elena Kagan is: she's a Jew who eats Chinese food on Christmas -- just like me! It will be nice to have someone who represents me sitting on the SCOTUS. But what does this have to do with Google's actions? Absolutely nothing. So why is it mentioned? Okay, I guess it's just a blog so attempts at humor are par. But it'd be nice if the humor was funny and didn't require googling (since google has a huge "ick factor". ha ha ha! that's an obscure political humor reference! google it!).

Okay, back to DP's idiocy, enough of mine.

I'm gonna take a breath and ask: what happened to letting big business do what it wants to do? What if google wanted to employ only gay people? Aren't conservatives supposed to favor letting business do what it wants?

Skipping ahead a bit:

Since it's illegal to ask an employee (or interviewee) to divulge his or her sexual preference, how exactly is Google finding out who's straight and who's gay to they know who to pay more?

That's easy: the same way my company knew when I got married. I told them, and they adjusted my benefits. There's absolutely nothing sinister or illegal or unethical or suspicious here. Because, of course, the new policy has nothing to do with who is gay or straight. It has to do with people who are paying extra taxes due to being in a domestic partnership.

Since google already extends health benefits to domestic partners, I'd wager that there's no "finding out" anything new for this new benefit. google already knows who is in a domestic partnership.

Of course, it's pretty obvious that one could infer most domestic partners are gay (that particular invitation to invasion of privacy could handily be avoided if gays could marry), but nobody at google is asking who is gay. They're adjusting payroll based on an election in an HR database.

Finally, the big one: the false equivalency:

I own a company that employs both caucasians and minorities. I put out a memo announcing that I've discovered that my white employees are paying higher property taxes, so in order to make it "fair" to everyone, I'm going to start paying white employees more so they can cover their extra property taxes.

This setup is in no way analogous to the google situation. Property taxes are not determined by sexual orientation, marriage status, or, as in the false analogy, skin color. They're determined based on the property. The most usual reason for one person to pay more property taxes than another (or at least, the ideal reason) is that he's got a more expensive property than the other.

In other words, the blogger is equating compensating owners of expensive property with offsetting the taxes incurred by legal technicalities that differentiate marriage from domestic partnership.

Owning expensive property is a choice, and it can be argued that entering a domestic partnership is also a choice. But that is not the analogy that the blogger is making. He is equating domestic partnership to being white to curry outrage at white people being over compensated. In the analogy, the white people magically have more property tax, glossing over the cause: they bought expensive property! They could have chosen to buy cheaper property and incur less property tax. But since domestic partners have no such choice (there's no cheaper domestic partnership option), and thus no option to lower the taxes incurred by their choice to be domestic partners, the situations are not analogous.

The equivalency is false, and any reasoning derived from the equivalency ("Jesse Jackson would be knocking on my door in 3...2...1...") is thus false.

Speaking as a bay area tech worker who knows an awful lot of bay area tech workers, gay, straight, transgendered, and whatever: around here, this is not a big deal. While this blogger (Doug Powers is a Michigan-based columnist and author) may be outraged that google has decided to offer this benefit to its employees, I'm pretty damn sure that nobody inside google is outraged. In fact, I'd go so far as to say nobody in the whole Bay Area is outraged. Quite the opposite.

The only remaining question is this: How many straight Google employees will go all "Chuck & Larry" just to make Google pay them a little extra money?

I guess this is supposed to be humor, again, but again, it shows how disconnected the blogger is from Bay Area culture in general, and google in particular.

If Mr. Powers is truly outraged by this egregious injustice against... uh, who exactly? Married people? Anyhow, he should take his outrage and exercise his power within the Free Market: he should stop using Google's ads (he hasn't), divest himself of any GOOG stock he owns (I have no way of knowing if he has or hasn't), stop using their products (I have no way of knowing if he has or hasn't). Otherwise he's just another gasbag hypocritically whining about how others conduct their private business.

UPDATE:

I'd also like to point out how offensive the caption is under the George Takai photo.

Now, I'm not the sort of person who takes offense at much besides stupidity. I am offended when stupidity is righteously embraced (Sarah Palin), or deceitfully employed (Rush Limbaugh). This caption is an example of the latter, assuming that the blogger himself is an intelligent person (like Rush) perpetrating calculated stupidity for personal gain (blog hits, of which, like a sucker, I've provided several).

"Live long and prosper more than straight people."

Any cursory understanding of George Takei's life would reveal that this attitude is totally alien (ha ha!) to the man. George Takei, unlike the divisive, spiteful blogger, is not about getting a leg up on people or laughing that he's got his and fuck everyone else.

In 2004, the government of Japan conferred the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Rosette, which represents the fourth highest of eight classes associated with the award. This decoration was presented in acknowledgment of his contributions to U.S.-Japanese relations.

Does that sound like someone who would say "Live long and prosper more than straight people"?

How about this: Takei has developed a friendly relationship with Stern cast member Artie Lange, whom Takei affectionately calls his "cuddly muffin." The two have become friends despite Lange's notorious penchant for his supposedly "homophobic" humor.

I'm sure Mr. Sulu is no saint, but he's worked hard in his life to be a loving uniter, not a spiteful divider, and the captioning on that photo is the kind of stupid smear that gets through my hard skin and offends me.