Google Is So Much Gayer Than You Thought

Some of you may remember this from last summer when
a rainbow appeared when searching for LGBT topics (S)

Google is so gay! That's why the American Family Association, or Buster Wilson in particular, along with all the other homophobic bigots, currently have their garments in a twist.

Since Google announced its 'Legalize Love' campaign a few days ago, homophobes all over the internet have been threatening to boycott Google for supporting gay rights.

But they obviously haven't been too observant over the last year or so, pictured left is a screenshot of the Google search bar from last summer for instance.

When you did a search for LGBT-related topics, such as "gay rights", "Stonewall" or "LGBT", a rainbow would appear next to the search button. This was just over a year ago, around the time when New York legalized same-sex marriage. So Google's support of the LGBT community is nothing new. I might just point out that at the time this feature was introduced, I had only just begun to accept my sexuality, and seeing this gave me hope. As someone who was down, depressed and struggling through some of the darkest and most difficult days of my life, faced with so much negativity, seeing nothing but hate, it lifted me up to know that an organization as big as Google was on my side.

A gay couple appeared in the Valentine's day Google Doodle

On Valentine's day this year, a gay couple appeared in the Google doodle. Google employees made an It Gets Better video back in October 2010. These are just some of the things Google has done in the last few years to hint (rather loudly) that they support equality.

This new 'Legalize Love' campaign has already been criticized by quite a few people and organizations, and not even homophobic ones at that. Some have called it overly "ambitious" and say it faces a lot of challenges. I think this is a little pessimistic. Google is the largest online search engine, and according to some of the latest estimations it is used by over 500 million people a day, making over 3 billion searches every 24 hours. That means the Google homepage gets viewed over 3 billion times a day. Sometimes there's a little update, advert, or announcement under the search bar. These usually stay up for a day. Everyone sees them. With this, Google have the power to reach over half a billion people a day, with any message they choose. This is why it is not being taken lightly. And yet, people are skeptical about the obstacles Google will face.

It's true that some governments are beginning to hinder certain websites' equality work. Some groups call on their governments to do so. Such is the case with Facebook in Russia after Facebook released new same-sex marriage icons for its users' timelines. But Google is a force to be reckoned with. The list of Google products is virtually endless as it's constantly expanding, as we've seen recently with the launch of Google+.

Maybe this latest equality thing was a step too far for Buster Wilson?

It was only a couple of weeks ago I was criticizing his anti-gay-marriage arguments about bestiality that were uploaded in a video uploaded to YouTube by RightWingWatch.org. I'm sure he wouldn't be too happy about that.

Recently, Wilson called upon all of AFA's followers to boycott Google. Here is a video extract from that show.

The more eagle-eyed amongst you might have noticed that by clicking the "More Info" button in the top right-hand corner you can see this video was in fact uploaded by the American Family Association itself! And this is not the only one. Oh, no, not at all! The American Family Association have uploaded close to 6,000 videos since creating their channel back in 2009.

The first efforts of the new campaign at London Pride (S)

But YouTube is owned by Google! In fact, Buster, the list is far more extensive than you made out. You may want to check out the scope of what you're suggesting and look at the full list of Google products. Oh, and good luck!

It seems homophobes and bigots will have to start using Bing or Yahoo! as Google is now off the list for them. The thought that every time they upload a video to YouTube, check their email in Gmail or simply do a Google search, that they would be exposed to Google adverts, thus funding an internet giant that supports equal love, is just out of the question.

Although, the computer was invented by a gay man, and we might not have to wait long to see Bing and Yahoo! follow suit...