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Google To Add Pay To Cover a Tax For Gays
GrApHiX42 writes "Starting on Thursday, Google is going to increase the salaries of gay and lesbian employees whose partners receive domestic partner health benefits, largely to compensate them for an extra tax they must pay that heterosexual married couples do not. Google is not the first company to make up for the extra tax. At least a few large employers already do. But benefits experts say Google's move could inspire its Silicon Valley competitors to follow suit, because they compete for the same talent."
... a tax for gays? w...why?
Christianity is a dumb one to mention, seeing as the bible is clearly anti-asspounding. You might as well complain about the government not giving special tax breaks for all the other "sins" too.
which is totally what she said
Why do gay couples pay more tax?
This is the angle I can never figure out. Homosexuality isn't like robbery or assault, it doesn't affect anyone except for those that participate in it. And, no, alternative sexual orientation is not a crime. The argument that a extending rights such as marriage to gay couples somehow lessens the social value of marriage is ridiculous. Following that same logical path, all those that do not practice christian marriage (Jewish, Islamic, Navajo) are also decreasing the social value of "christian" marriage.
I hope that Google's position in this matter will help influence other companies and eventually federal and state policies positively. If enough companies throw their weight behind this issue, it will become standard to offer a salary benefit for gay partners to cover the tax difference. Once it becomes standard, you can bet that companies will start lobbying congress to solve this problem in order to save them money.
Aside from the tax issues, how can anyone that appreciates the freedoms offered by our constitution and the rationale backing it in the declaration of independence, willfully discriminate against another based solely on private, personal preference? After all, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all [people] are created equal."
This one's tricky. You have to use imaginary numbers, like eleventeen... --Hobbes
From the article:
Working for a company as rich as Google comes with an incredible number of fringe benefits: the free food, the free laundry, the doctor on duty at company headquarters and the impressive five months of maternity leave with full pay and benefits, to mention a few.
Five months is impressive? 26 weeks (almost 6 months) is a legal right over here. In some countries it's much, much more!
Legalize it... Fixes the whole problem (and makes us look a little less like rednecks to the civilized world.)
Either legalize same-sex marriage, or just do away with any kind of legal marriage at all. The latter is what I would do if I had my way. Why does the state meddle in what should be a commitment between two people?
And Google isn't helping same-sex couples much. Sure, they are making up for some tax exemptions those couples don't have, but in a wider view they are helping maintain the status quo of marriage laws that are flawed in the first place, in addition to discriminating against heterosexual unmarried couples.
In your country, a heterosexual couple can actually get married.
A gay couple can't, the unmarried heterosexual couples are depriving themselves of the benefit this type of contract provides by choice.
C17H21NO4
your reasonning
1- assumes children is the only thing people can contribute to society. How about the guy that decrypted Nazi communications in WW2, and so on ?
2- assumes all children are a good thing. They may all have the potential to be, but in the end, some are clearly not, and not only will not contribute anything to your retirement fund, but will take a faire bit from it, or kill you.
3- does not handle the case of heterosexuals who can't have kids.. same treatment for them, then ?
4- forgets that some or most homosexuals would like to have, or foster, kids, while at the same time plenty of kids are missing parents.
Other than that, it's a very good reasoning, not oversimplified at all...
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
What most people don't know is that almost all churches have charters that deal with the complexities evident in the old testament. In those charters they directly or indirectly decide what they are going to accept from the old testament, so there is always interpretation and a desire to sculpt religion into something socially palatable. Do you think Christ was born on December 25?
Not arguing, just expanding.
An important change for education.
All Christians believe whatever they want, and justify it by selective reading of the Bible. Perhaps the fact that so many end up with "New Testament values of love and forgiveness" is comforting evidence that not everyone's inherent tendencies are towards violent opposition to people unlike themselves, but I don't think it has any bearing on what "correct" Christianity is.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
Unmarried people in the US are taxed extra? Why?!
The conservatives in the UK have been going on about bringing back tax breaks for married couples (and civil partnerships, but those aren't available to heterosexual couples here yet - I'm also one of those people that doesn't agree with marriage but support the idea of civil unions) - I really don't see what the hell marriage is supposed to achieve, and add to that the UK having the highest divorce rate in europe I don't see any form of tax break as going to make "families" more "stable".
Stupid political posturing. Why can't the state just treat people as individuals?
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
One site tries to say that the bible is simply criticising non-Christian worship practices when it complains about same sex relationships, but that's clearly a load of horse shit. It would just say so if that was the case.
There might be more truth in it than you know. If you place these scriptures in the context of the time when they were written. Christians were basically a new sect who stood up against 'the man', the Romans at that time. A lot of passages from the new testament are thinly veiled references to the evils of the Roman empire. These are the same Romans who we all know loved to pound ass, so it's fairly logical to also point this out as another 'evil' thing to do... it's a basic method of undermining your enemy by attacking their culture, it happened then and it happens today.
Google is in California, so instead of stoning gays, they get stoned and have their first gay experience.
Ain't it funny, South Africa, a nation beseth with difficulties and racial tensions has a more civilized attitude towards gays then the US of A.
And you forget the best about a girl of 13, if you turn her over, she looks just like a boy of 13. Bonus!
Ooh I am going to get it for that one. Petrus is going to spank my ass, the big hunk.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I did not hear about such a tax and it could not possibly exist in European Union because discriminating laws are forbidden. Though some european country (France does) give tax cuts to couples with children to encourage procreation and thus reduce the population aging.
Stupidity is the root of all evil.
I know a guy who's a former rabbi and is currently a professor of religion. He told me that the Sodom and Gomorrah story is about hospitality law and not homosexuality. Basically, you don't just rape strangers. You take them in, feed them, and so on. Even offer them one (or some) of your women. He told me a lot more about it, but I'm afraid that I can't recall all of it. I'm not offering this as a counter-argument, just as a possible interesting avenue to consider.
I don't remember exactly how it came up, but a particular jewish friend of mine and I ended up talking about the Lot story.
She was stunned to hear how Christians taught the story and pulled up the Torah, read the passage and pretty much translated it word for word the way I had it in the English. Then she became absolutely adamant that the intended meaning was that the men from the town wanted to beat the men up, not have sex with them.
Her claim was that it was not about homosexuality but a city with gangs that didn't like outsiders. I can't say as I have studied it enough to have my own opinion, but that was her take on it.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Indeed - I think it would be much better to offer the extra benefit to any unmarried partners. It solves several problems:
* It's not then unfair to people who are unmarried with opposite sex partners.
* It avoids the sticky question of whether this might be illegal discrimination. It's an interesting problem - whilst it's trying to address the original discrimination that exists, which I think is good for them to do, it's now reasonable for someone to argue that how they pay their employees is discrimination (I don't know if sexuality is a protected class for employment discrimination in the US?) Whilst technically they would still be discriminating against people who are married, this is far less repugnant (since marriage is a choice), and has far less risk of being illegal.
* Gay people don't have to out themselves - they simply say they've got an unmarried partner.
TFA says:
The extra compensation to cover the domestic partner tax will apply only to same-sex domestic partners, Mr. Bock said, because heterosexual couples can avoid the added tax by marrying.
That may be true, but there are plenty of reasons why opposite sex couples may not wish to get married (e.g., they don't want to enter in a contract for life, with all the implications and connotations that brings). An equal system must treat people the same, not create a separate class system for gay people (another example is here in the UK where we have civil partnerships for gay people - I believe that gay people should be able to get married, but it's also a problem that straight people can't have civil partnerships - not because I'm thinking "oh no, think of the poor straight people", but it's emphasising that gay people should be treated differently).
Of course, it would be a lot simpler if gay people could get married, so I hope any straight people thinking this is unfair is in favour of gay marriage.
I'm all for getting the State out of marriage. That should be a religious proposition, rather than a civil one. Benefits, taxes and the like should simply not take into account people's marital status, and instead should treat each adult as an independent entity. If you want to create a default "we share everything" contract, that allows for things like making decisions about childcare, powers of attorney and the like automatic, and that any set of people can go down to the justice of the peace and obtain for a nominal fee, I see no problem with that. It would provide the benefits marriage now provides, without the State getting involved in people's relationships.
However, your read of the Declaration is way off. It was an argument against private judgement, but an argument against class. By declaring that all men are created equal, the Declaration says that the circumstances of your birth (the wealth of your parents, the color of your skin, physical handicaps and so forth) do not change your value as a person. In other words, aristocracy is (if you accept the Declaration's self-evident truths) inherently a perversion of natural law, setting some above others by the mere circumstances of their birth.
The immediate problem that arises is "what about slavery?" If we're all supposed to be created equal, why did that not apply to slaves. The answer is not a moral answer, but a crass political answer. The economy of the South was predicated on slavery; take away slavery and the South would have sunk into deep poverty. (Even if not true, and I am not convinced that it is true, it was a view nearly universally held by Southerners in the 1780s, when the Constitution was written.) The question of allowing slavery was thus an existential question for the South: if slavery were not allowed, the southern states could not be part of the United States and continue to exist with any hope of prosperity. For the North, slavery was not an issue, simply because their economy was predicated on shipping and trade instead of pre-industrial agriculture. So for the northern states, the imperative was to hold the states together into a single country, to avoid the constant warfare that existed in Europe from the fall of Rome to the end of WWII. Essentially, the South would not yield on slavery, and the North would not yield on there being a single nation in the former colonies. The obvious compromise was to allow slavery, despite the fact that it was a contravention of the principles of the Declaration of Independence.
If you see in that the setup for the Civil War, congratulations. It has been said that all of American history can be summed up as "Pickett's Charge, the events leading to it and the consequences thereof." This misunderstanding of the principles of the Declaration of Independence, along with the death of Federalism (particularly subsidiarity) and the triumph of the French Enlightenment over the English Enlightenment, are some of the sadder of those consequences.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
It seems from your argument that kids in marriages already have the breaks of a stable home life, and that the tax breaks should therefore go to unmarried people with kids - they're likely to have a harsher upbringing so they need all the help they can get, no?
Even the new testament criticizes homosexual relationships
While I definitely accept this as one possibility. I have a problem with people stating it as fact. From what we know, all references to homosexuality were written by Paul and were originally put down in Greek. The Greek language did not actually have a word for homosexual at the time so Paul utilized two different ones. The first one was Pederraste (meaning Pedophile) which definitely raises concerns about how it was translated to an entirely different word: 'homosexual'.
The second word used is arsenokoitai (spelling probably terrible), which Paul actually just made up, and didn't explicate further. It literally translates as "man bed". While I can accept that someone might utilize those terms to create a word for homosexual, I do not think it makes sense to say it conclusively.
So as far as I'm concerned, the New Testament says nothing of note about homosexuality.
PS - Not a Christian, just a textual analysis nerd.
He told me that the Sodom and Gomorrah story is about hospitality law and not homosexuality.
This is supported by Ezekiel chapter 16:
Behold, this was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy. They were haughty and did an abomination before me.
The men of Sodom were certainly sodomites, but that's not why their city burned.
Oh, sure. Typical gay-agenda, liberal bleating about the rank hypocrisy that pervades most of what passes for Christianity in the U.S. today. How dare you call attention to such inconvenient contradictions in their book of folk tales... er, holy writ? A lot of people have paid a lot of good money to good Christian leaders like Ted Haggerty and George Rekers so that they can feel good about hating gay people. And now you want them to start hating shell-fish eaters and wearers of poly-cotton blends?
You insensitive clod.
Yup
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodomy
It seems your education about linguistics needs to be updated.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
That is true.
The answer is this then -- civil union. No, not as an alternative to marriage for gays, but as a replacement. Separate legal marriage from religious marriage completely. Civil unions get "cut and pasted" in place of marriage in all the laws, and add a clear protection that protects all religious groups from having to perform marriage/union ceremonies of any kind for any one for any reason at their discretion.
There, there is no longer a legal difference between one couple and the next because one is gay and the other is not, it's clearly and explicitly stated that your church doesn't have to marry gays if it doesn't want to in clear black and white, and if you really feel like it, you can say that because they weren't married according to your faith that they aren't "really" married.
The other interesting bit about the story of Lot at Sodom is that the story is hardly unique to the biblical reference. The basic story shows up in lots of other cultures and goes something like this:
- 2 divine figures are traveling around looking for righteous people disguised as poor wanderers.
- Most everyone in town reject them, and treat them badly.
- One family takes them in and takes care of them to the best of their ability.
- The divine figures reward that one family, and punish the rest of the populace.
This story shows up in Ovid and in the Poetic Edda, for instance.
I am officially gone from
Except they aren't paying ALL homosexuals more than heterosexuals. Only those in domestic partner situations where, were the laws not discriminatory, they would have the same benefits at the same price as a married couple. They aren't giving it to people just for being gay. The single or non-domestic partnered homosexuals are not receiving this pay increase.
Just to put into perspective, for a while my registered domestic partner was receiving his benefits through me, The cost to me was about $50-$60 (forget exact number) per paycheck (bi-weekly) more than if one of us was female and could enter into a marriage contract. So basically we were getting taxed an extra $100 a month because we are gay.
It is unfair. For this reason, unmarried hetero partners should get out there and support gay marriage.
Your friend apparently does not know any biblical Hebrew.
Gen. 19:5: bring them out to us, that we may be intimate with them (heb. ve-neidah, word root yod-dalet-a'in)
Gen. 19:8: Look, I have two daughters who have not known a man. (heb. lo-yade'u, word root yod-dalet-a'in)
Unless one is prepared to say that the Lot's daughters have not seen a male in their lives, the word with the Hebrew root yod-dalet-a'in which also means "to know" should be translated as "being intimate; to have sex" in both cases. What was exactly the sin of Sodom is not clear, but it is probably a combination of a lack of hospitality, rape, and male homosexuality, since these three are not separated in the story and go under the general title of "an outcry that reached God"
Here in Aussieland, one supermarket chain (can't remember which) pays the GST (Goods and Services Tax) for us. Basically when the GST came out, they kept the 'sanitary products' the same price on the shelf, so we didn't have to pay the 10% extra.