Awal bulan Juli 2010 ini kaum LGBT internasional mendapat kabar baik. Perdana Menteri Islandia yang sudah menyatakan diri sebagai lesbian Johanna Sigurdardottir melangsungkan pernikahan dengan partnernya yang sudah lama menjalin hubungan dengannya, Jonina Leosdottir.

Sementara itu Google, perusahaan search engine paling populer sejagat menerapkan aturan baru bahwa pasangan pegawai gay/lesbian juga memperoleh manfaat sama seperti yang diterima oleh pasangan heteroseksual. Manfaat-manfaat tersebut antara lain asuransi kesehatan dan perhitungan pajak untuk pasangan. Artinya Google mengakui keberadaan pasangan sesama jenis. Sayangnya, peraturan ini baru berlaku untuk karyawan Google di Amerika Serikat. Jadi kapan ya Indonesia menyusul?

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Iceland’s lesbian PM ties the knot
28 June 2010

Dikutip dari: http://www.sbs.com.au
Iceland Prime Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir married her long-time partner on Sunday as a new law legalising homosexual marriages came into force.

Iceland Prime Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir married her long-time partner on Sunday as a new law legalising homosexual marriages came into force.

Sigurdardottir, in her late 60s, formally married writer Jonina Leosdottir after the couple submitted a demand for their civil union to be transformed into a marriage, the RUV broadcaster said.

Iceland’s parliament on June 12 unamimously adopted legislation allowing gay marriage, in a law that came into force on Sunday.

First openly gay PM
Homosexual couples could previously enter into a civil partnership and benefit from the same rights as heterosexual couples, but this had not been considered a formal marriage.

Sigurdardottir, born in 1942, took power in February 2009. She has lived with Ledsdottir, who is in her fifties, for several years and the couple entered a civil union in 2002.

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Google strengthens benefits for gay or lesbian workers
Dikutip dari: (AFP) – http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article

SAN FRANCISCO, USA — Google on Thursday improved health and family leave benefits for its US employees with same-sex domestic partners.

The Internet titan began adjusting the pay of workers in such relationships to offset income tax paid on health insurance benefits extended to partners, according to Cynthia Yeung of the firm’s strategic development team.

The California company also put same-sex couples on par with traditional man-woman spouses when it comes to how much time they are allowed to take off from work for family or medical reasons, Yeung said in a blog post.

Google has also worked with its health insurance carriers to define “infertility” as an inability to conceive a child for one year with no stipulations on trying.

Nearly 300 “Googlers’ with colorful balloons marched in San Francisco’s 40th annual Pride parade on Sunday.

“We braved the rain in Boston, enjoyed the sun in New York, rode a trolley in Chicago and marched with the Israel Gay Youth Organization in Tel Aviv and Haifa,” Yeung said of Google workers taking part in such celebrations.

“Googlers will be participating in EuroPride, held in Poland this year, as well as many other parades, including Tokyo for the first time. And we’ll be celebrating Pride season in Singapore too.”

Google openly supports equality for lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and transgender workers. The company opposed a successful California initiative to legally define “marriage” as exclusively a union between a man and a woman.

“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,” Google co-founder Sergey Brin said when the company came out in 2008 against the initiative that was passed later that year by voters in the state.

“We should not eliminate anyone’s fundamental rights, whatever their sexuality, to marry the person they love.”

Copyright © 2010 AFP. All rights reserved