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Google Launches Worldwide LGBT Equality Campaign “Legalize Love” – What About In The USA?

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LGBT friendly Google Inc. has announced that it has launched a global campaign in support of LGBT Equality and same-sex marriage equality.

“Legalize Love” will launch today in Poland and Singapore and then,  they hope, the rest of the world and will focus on places with homophobic cultures, where anti-gay laws exist.

Google’s Mark Palmer-Edgecumbe:

“We want our employees who are gay or lesbian or transgender to have the same experience outside the office as they do in the office. It is obviously a very ambitious piece of work. Their strategy involves developing partnerships between companies and organizations to support grass-roots campaigns

(Countries like) 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.” At the end of the day, the “Legalize Love” campaign is also good for Google’s business. “We operate in many countries and have a very globally mobile workforce. 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,”

In Singapore, sex between men is still a crime.  Section 377A of the Penal Code  of Singapore is the main remaining piece of legislation which criminalizes sex  between mutually consenting adult men.

Will Google run the “Legalize Gay” campaign in the USA?  That still remains to be seen.

But while America is not as bad as many counties in its treatment of the LGBT community, neither is the most progressive or the best.

Countries such as Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain. Canada, and even South Africa are far more accepting and advanced when it comes to LGBT Equality laws and acceptance.

And for that America, a country in which supposedly “all men are created equal”,  should be deeply ashamed.

Barclays Plc to Join Google And Reimburse Gay Workers for Taxes on U.S. Benefits

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Same-sex partners pay an average of $1,069 more in federal tax than people in heterosexual marriages with the same benefits, according to a 2007 study conducted by the Center for American Progress and the Williams Institute.  But now some companies are stepping up to be gair to thier LGBT employees where the Uniteds States goverment will not.
Barclays Plc, Britain’s third- largest bank, is joining Google Inc. and a small number of companies in reimbursing U.S. employees for federal tax they pay on health benefits provided to same-sex domestic partners. 
The aim is to offset the tax on benefits for same-sex partners that doesn’t apply to spouses in heterosexual marriages because same-sex partnerships aren’t recognized as marriages under U.S. law, the London-based bank said today in a statement. The change will take effect Jan. 1, according to the bank, which bought the U.S. business of bankrupt Wall Street firm Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. in 2008. “We are introducing this payment to proactively offset the additional tax,” Mark Lane, a spokesman for Barclays Capital, said “We believe that by offering this, we will further our efforts to promote an inclusive environment.” Barclays will reimburse employees through a separate payment rather than an increase in base salary.

Reimbursements or “gross-up” benefits offered by Google and Barclays would increase costs for the employers but could improve employee retention, said Todd A. Solomon, a partner with the employee-benefits group of law firm McDermott Will & Emery in Chicago. “It’s simply to provide equal pay for equal work in this civil rights issue, there’s really no financial incentive,” Solomon said in a phone interview. “The bottom line is more than how much cash you spend today, it may help the bottom line to be seen as the employer of choice.”