
Google Doodle Upholds Gay Rights Ahead of Sochi Olympics - c2prods
http://newsfeed.time.com/2014/02/06/google-gay-rights-sochi-olympic-doodle/
======
bdfh42
In passing and in contrast to Google I noticed that Yahoo's display of Dilbert
cartoons at [http://news.yahoo.com/comics/dilbert-
slideshow/](http://news.yahoo.com/comics/dilbert-slideshow/) shows a different
cartoon to the main Dilbert site
[http://www.dilbert.com/strips/](http://www.dilbert.com/strips/) for today. Is
this an editorial decision or just a cock up do you think?

~~~
itchitawa
They're probably just trying to be sensitive to their audience and sponsors.
Google also censors pornography because a subset of users are offended by it.

~~~
edoloughlin
I don't think equating porn and gay rights is very helpful.

~~~
itchitawa
It helps to highlight our cultural biases. In some cultures pornography is
more acceptable than homosexuality. These are just different prejudices that
different people hold. It's not obvious which is more right or wrong.

~~~
edoloughlin
One is a choice and the other is not. It's obvious to me which prejudice is
wrong.

------
usaphp
How does a law that bans gay propaganda to kids have anything to do with
Olympics? They don't ban gay sportsmen or anything, I don't see why they are
making such a big thing around it during the Olympics...has nothing to do with
Olympics.

I wonder if Olympics were held in USA this year, would those same magazines
put NSA logos and colors all over their screen just to show that spying on own
citizens is bad? Or would google put DO NOT TRACK logo on their doodle? I
doubt...

~~~
antimagic
Yes, gay propaganda, like kissing your loved one in public. Or admitting that
you find someone of the same sex "hot". I'm pretty sure gay athletes are not
feeling like the big welcome mat has been rolled out for them at this year's
Olympics, and Russia totally deserves to be publicly pilloried for it.

~~~
usaphp
I doubt that gay athletes are thinking about promoting homosexualism among
kids in Russia, they have more interesting and important things to do on
Olympics games. The only people who seem to be bothered so far are the media
outlets looking for bold titles.

There are so many gays in Russia and I have several gays friends back there,
and they live the same life as none gay people. There is NO law agains gays in
Russia, the law is agains propaganda of homosexuality to kids, thats it. A lot
of Russian artists and media hosts are gays and they never hide it and
Russians don't really care about it as much as Western media does.

~~~
matthewmacleod
_I doubt that gay athletes are thinking about promoting homosexualism among
kids in Russia,_

Yeah, but we all know what this law actually involves, and it's disingenuous
to claim otherwise.

The "anti-propoganda" law essentially bans gay pride events and public defence
of gay rights. It was backed by a president who directly equated homosexuality
and paedophillia. That's not a gay-friendly environment, by any stretch of the
imagination.

This is good old-fashioned minority-hate-stirring, and it should be roundly
condemned. That fact that there are no explicit laws banning homosexuality in
Russia is nearly irrelevant.

------
emhart
What is happening on this thread? Is this really a reflection of the community
here at hn? I'm flabbergasted. Wake up, West coast, we need you!

~~~
hamax
This is embarrassing for the whole community. But I won't say it surprises me,
I lost most of the hope while reading comments about anything gender related.

------
coloncapitald
Google has been running a campaign for two years about gay rights and
discouraging 'homophobia' ([https://www.google.com/diversity/legalise-
love.html](https://www.google.com/diversity/legalise-love.html)). Also, three
main sponsors of Olympics including AT&T have also spoken out against Russian
laws.

~~~
ZoFreX
I'm curious. Why the scare quotes?

~~~
theknown99
Perhaps because "homophobia" isn't a good word for it.

Hitler wasn't a jewphobe.

~~~
antimagic
Well, homophobia is generally supposed to be considered in the light of Yoda-
ism "Fear leads to hate..."

~~~
theknown99
Verging offtopic I guess but:

As an example though, I'm not a pedophileaphobe - I'm not afraid of
pedophiles. I think what they do is wrong.

The number of people who are "afraid" of homosexuals is miniscule. Most people
who you'd label "homophobic" actually just believe that homosexuality is
wrong, not that it's scary.

So the "homophobic" tag is pretty silly.

~~~
James_Duval
They are not scared of homosexuals, but of homosexuality. It represents a
threat to set values and a set way of living to certain individuals. If it
wasn't considered a threat to those values, why suppress it? It's homophobia.

------
kshatrea
In India, the Supreme Court recently quashed an appeal and made homosexuality
an illegal act under Section 377. Its reasoning was that it is the law that
must be changed and therefore it was a legislative act that was required to
quash what is an obviously discriminatory law. I applaud Google for their
stand on Russia, but I question why they didn't do the same thing in India.
Conspiracy theorists would say because Russia is a strategic foe of the USA
and India is not. I am not in that camp, but I do find the question
interesting.

~~~
Grue3
Because there's no Olympics in India right now?

~~~
MisterWebz
Which means we shouldn't care about people in India getting arrested because
they're gay?

~~~
matthewmacleod
Nobody said that - it's a strawman.

~~~
emhart
This whole thread is a masterclass in falsely framing arguments.

------
iaskwhy
The discussion here is scary, very scary.

~~~
Udo
Indeed. If einhverfr and usaphp and their fans do in fact represent the
majority opinion of this site (which they apparently do), this makes HN a very
uncomfortable place to be.

It's for these reasons I prefer not to have political topics or anything
regarding social injustice and religion on HN at all. I actually prefer not to
know what most people here think of women, gay people, poor people,
foreigners, atheists, you name it.

The interesting thing is that those same people can appear completely
reasonable and enjoyable to talk with in most contexts relevant to hackers.
But every once in a while a topic like this one comes along and you discover
that they believe homosexual propaganda is a thing, that persecuting
homosexuals is a valid move to maximize reproduction, and that we should
respect oppressive systems because of their culture.

------
Fice
The anti-gay laws are there not because the Russian government is homophobic.
These laws were created to provoke reactions like this or
[http://youtu.be/0KWhaqr1v8s](http://youtu.be/0KWhaqr1v8s) which will help to
turn some strata of the Russian population firmly against the West and prepare
ground for the new Iron Curtain. Thank you Google for helping Putin!

~~~
einhverfr
But to be fair, Google isn't the only one doing stupid stuff like this. Read
this piece slowly and see if you notice what I noticed:
[http://www.alternet.org/world/us-evangelicals-fueled-rise-
ru...](http://www.alternet.org/world/us-evangelicals-fueled-rise-russias-pro-
family-right?page=0%2C2&paging=off&current_page=1)

What I noticed was that while the author was male, with the exception of
Medvedev (whose position on abortion he didn't talk about), every politician
he attacked in the Russian government on the abortion issue was a woman.
Evidently Russian women (according to Alternet and The Nation) cannot be
trusted with setting abortion policy: that role must fall to Western men....

------
edoloughlin
Tangentially related, but this is one of the most eloquent, simply stated
views on the issue I've seen: [http://www.buzzfeed.com/tomphillips/watch-an-
irish-drag-quee...](http://www.buzzfeed.com/tomphillips/watch-an-irish-drag-
queens-powerful-speech-about-homophobia)

~~~
morsch
That is stunningly good. What a powerful orator. Thank you for sharing.

------
ScottWhigham
That's an interesting grammatical choice of the word "upholds" in the title,
OP. When I read "gay rights" and "upholds" together, I start thinking about
the law. My first thought when opening this thread was trying to understand
what role Google had in upholding the laws related to gay rights (I was
clearly wrong haha). But then I thought about it - maybe you meant "supports"
but English isn't your first language? They are technically synonyms - support
and uphold - but, in common usage when discussing things like this, I think
most English-as-first-language speakers would have used the word "supports" to
avoid confusion with legal bodies.

Google Doodle Supports Gay Rights Ahead of Sochi Olympics

------
einhverfr
I get deeply uncomfortable when Google does something like this. In general I
think it is easy to judge someone half a world away and it is very hard to get
things right when looking across cultural barriers. I am going to give my
perspective here as an American living in Indonesia and married to a Chinese-
Indonesian.

One of the key issues that nobody looks at when they talk about this is very
distinctly a collective lifestyle choice: retirement living and who retirees
live with. This is undoubtedly a collective lifestyle choice, and societies
tend to fall in one of two groups: retire with the kids (the international
norm) or retire with the spouse.

This has tremendous implications for views on reproduction and hence
sexuality. Not only is childlessness not a viable personal choice in retire-
with-the-children cultures but same-sex couples _can never have equality_ in
such cultures. Even if you revert the controversial laws in Russia, they would
be replaced with very binding social pressures that are not easily resisted.

Part of the reason is that as soon as the norm is that people retire with the
kids, and as soon as this expectation is set, then parents get (and find ways
to make actionable) a legitimate interest in who their children marry. This
means that parents effectively have something nearly like a veto power over
childrens' spousal choices but that veto can be overridden by "accidental"
pregnancy. This fact effectively dooms the notion of equal rights for same-sex
couples in such cultures, and in the end one is, I think, forced either to
recognize an equivalent to social security payments as a human right or
concede that actual access to same-sex marriage is not one.

Russia is in the retire-with-the-kids category, and as a result they have a
strong interest in maintaining a sort of traditional family structure that has
all but disappeared in Western Europe, the United States, Canada, etc, namely
the multi-generation household. On the other hand, for cultures where the
primary human contact in retirement is the spouse, then it is deeply unfair to
deny people the choice of that relationship for whatever reason they want to
spend that time with someone of the same sex (and the reason really is
unimportant at that point).

As an American living in another retire-with-the-kids culture, I will say that
such systems work and work out well for everyone, but that isn't a reason to
perpetuate gross unfairness in the US.

So I stand in the awkward place of saying that most Western countries probably
should look at legalizing same-sex marriage, but that a gay rights movement
really would be deeply socially disruptive in a really bad way in much of the
world (including Russia).

Like it or not, if we ever succeeded in remaking the world in the American
image, we'd destroy the planet. If you don't believe me, look at per capita
greenhouse gas emissions.

~~~
chris_wot
I'm not a person who usually weighs into these sort of debates, but I want to
address something with you.

Your entire post is based on the premise that each culture's practices are all
valid within the culture that they are practised within. This is demonstrably
false. The fact that Russians support each other via a traditional
heterosexual family unit does not in any way mean that someone who is gay
should be discriminated against.

The whole premise of your argument is that gays cannot retire with children,
so they will be a burden upon the state. That's absurd. What about those who
are childless? Or remain single all their lives? Or lose a spouse early and
never have children? Seems to me that such systems do _not_ "work and work out
well for everyone".

~~~
osipov
Your premise that Western culture's social norms are absolute and universal is
far more dangerous than OP's idea of having each culture define its own
practices. The West has a genocidal history of bringing "civilization" to
other cultures that resulted in their decimation. I fear that colonial
imperialism justified by "white man's burden" is being replaced with "human
rights imperialism" where the Western dogma of human rights justifies invasion
or manipulation of countries out of favor with the West. Case in point
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6f3rHZV5JQ](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6f3rHZV5JQ)
discussion of US State Dept. Ambassador to Ukraine on how to install US chosen
puppets in Ukraine.

~~~
chris_wot
_Your premise that Western culture 's social norms are absolute and universal
is far more dangerous than OP's idea of having each culture define its own
practices._

Yeah, I'm not.

------
camus2
I bet they wont to the same with the World Cup and the United Arab Emirates
,too much oil there, hypocrites. And what about India? and all the other
countries where homosexuality is a crime ?

~~~
magicalist
> _I bet they wont to the same with the World Cup and the United Arab Emirates
> ,too much oil there, hypocrites._

Russia is the largest producer of oil in the world, smart guy. I don't imagine
oil has a stranglehold on Google anyways. Maybe you have your angry phrases
mixed up?

For the rest: [http://www.google.com/diversity/legalise-
love.html](http://www.google.com/diversity/legalise-love.html)

------
davidblueit
the background image for Google Now on my phone is also rainbow themed

[http://i.imgur.com/sgfXgvs.png](http://i.imgur.com/sgfXgvs.png)

------
Geee
If Google does something it isn't automatically on topic of 'hacker news'..

From HN guidelines:

>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're
evidence of some interesting new phenomenon ... If they'd cover it on TV news,
it's probably off-topic.

...

>If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and
clicking on the "flag" link.

------
justincormack
Channel 4 in the UK also has added the rainbow to its logo for the week, but
Google didnt go as far, C4 have a "Gay Mountain" video too
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6RID82Ru-k](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6RID82Ru-k)

------
Eupolemos
I can't help but feel that Russia making homosexuality illegal is a simple
troll-move. Have the world go ballistic, so noone will look at the things that
are truly important (not saying gay rights aren't important, but in Russia
it's less than a drop in the ocean).

I think we're all feeding the troll.

~~~
emocakes
since when did Russia make homosexuality illegal? It's still illegal in Texas.
What Russia made illegal was promoting the, 'alternative lifestyle' to minors.

~~~
evgen
Homosexuality has not been illegal in any manner in the US or any US state
since the Lawrence v. Texas case in 2003, which overturned the last few state
holdouts on this issue. And don't kid yourself about what some ignorant thugs
in Russia have made illegal...

~~~
magicalist
Moreover, being homosexual was never illegal in the first place; it was sodomy
laws that made gay _sex_ (and, in many cases, any non-vaginal sex by anyone) a
crime.

These laws _were_ used as tools to specifically target gay people, but I make
the distinction because gay _speech_ , the issue in Russia right now, has
always been protected by the first amendment.

~~~
einhverfr
Interestingly, Justice O'Connor filed an opinion concurring in judgement in
Lawrence where she would have only struck down laws that singled out same-sex
conduct, allowing laws to remain on the books if they included opposite-sex
conduct too.

------
chris_wot
It appears this story has hit the flame filter.

