The Daily Background

It’s always great to see ground-breaking companies like Apple and Google taking progressive stances on issues like these:

Apple has joined Google in publicly opposing California’s Proposition 8, a measure intended to ban the rights of gay Californians to legally marry, and has contributed $100,000 to defeat the measure.

Both companies have a history of remaining politically neutral, but have chosen to take sides on this issue because it relates directly to the civil rights and opportunities of their employees.

In its Hot News feed, the company stated, “Apple is publicly opposing Proposition 8 and making a donation of $100,000 to the No on 8 campaign. Apple was among the first California companies to offer equal rights and benefits to our employees’ same-sex partners, and we strongly believe that a person’s fundamental rights — including the right to marry — should not be affected by their sexual orientation. Apple views this as a civil rights issue, rather than just a political issue, and is therefore speaking out publicly against Proposition 8.”

Earlier, Google co-founder and president Sergey Brin wrote in the Official Google Blog, “it is the chilling and discriminatory effect of the proposition on many of our employees that brings Google to publicly oppose Proposition 8. While we respect the strongly-held beliefs that people have on both sides of this argument, we see this fundamentally as an issue of equality. We hope that California voters will vote no on Proposition 8 — we should not eliminate anyone’s fundamental rights, whatever their sexuality, to marry the person they love.”

Nice!

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