Google Employees Fret That ‘Family Friendly’ Is a ‘Homophobic’ Term

A Google vice president had to address employees’ “concerns” after many of them supported the idea that the phrase “family friendly” was “offensive” and “homophobic.”

According to an article in The Daily Caller, the trouble started when a Google executive used the phrase “family friendly” when discussing a product for children during a company-wide presentation. One employee reportedly became so upset that he stormed out, later explaining in an internal thread that using the word “family” to mean “household with children” was “offensive, inappropriate, homophobic, and wrong.”

The thread added that using the phrase “family friendly” was “a diminishing and disrespectful way to speak.”

“If you mean ‘children,’ say ‘children;’ we have a perfectly good word for it,” the thread began. “‘Family friendly’ used as a synonym for ‘kid friendly’ means, to me, ‘you and yours don’t count as a family unless you have children.’

“The use of ‘family’ as a synonym for ‘with children’ has a long-standing association with deeply homophobic organizations. This does not mean we should not use the word ‘family’ to refer to families, but it mean[s] we must doggedly insist that family does not imply children.”

The thread also clarified that the phrase is offensive “even in the sense, ‘suitable for the whole family,’” because it “is almost always used to mean a household with two adults, of opposite sex, in a romantic/sexual relationship, with two or more children.”

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