Calling family 'family' sparks meltdown for Google workers

Calling family "family" has sparked a meltdown among workers at Google, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation, including one who lashed out at company officials for their "disrespectful way to speak."

The Daily Caller cited insider documents provided by a source who insisted on remaining anonymous.

The revolt began when a company official was talking to employees about features of Google's Unicorn product that continually use the word "family" as a synonym for "household with children."

"That employee posted an extended rant, which was well-received by his colleagues, on why linking families to children is 'offensive, inappropriate, homophobic, and wrong,'" the Daily Caller said.

The worker's scolding included: "This is a diminishing and disrespectful way to speak. If you mean 'children', say 'children'; we have a perfectly good word for it. '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'. And while kids may often be less aware of it, there are kids without families too, you know."

The worker claimed the word "family" as a reference to "with children," long has been linked to "deeply homophobic organizations."

The worker went on: "Even the sense, 'suitable for the whole family', which you might think is unobjectionable, is totally wrong too. It only works if we have advance shared conception of what 'the whole family' is, and that is almost always used to mean a household with two adults, of opposite sex, in a romantic/sexual relationship, with two or more of their own children. If you mean that as a synonym for 'suitable for all people' stop and notice the extraordinary unlikelihood of such a thought! So 'suitable for the whole family' doesn't mean 'all people', it means 'all people in families', which either means that all those other people aren't in families, or something even worse. Use the word 'family' to mean a loving assemblage of people who may or may not live together and may or may not include people of any particular age. STOP using it to mean 'children'. It's offensive, inappropriate, homophobic, and wrong."

Dozens of other workers joined in, including Google Vice President Pavni Diwanji.

"Hi everyone, I realize what we said at tgif might have caused concerns in the way we talked about families. There are families without kids too, and also we needed to be more conscientious about the fact that there is a diverse makeup of parents and families, Dwiwanji wrote.

"Please help us get to a better state. Teach us how to talk about it in inclusive way, if you feel like we are not doing it well. As a team we have very inclusive culture, and want to do right in this area. I am adding my team here so we can have open conversation."

DCNF reported some 100 Google employees signaled agreement.

One worker lashed out at conservatives, writing: "Using the word 'family' in this sense bothers me too. It smacks of the 'family values' agenda by the right wing, which is absolutely homophobic by its very definition."

The Daily Caller previously reported Google employees "had internal debates about whether to suppress right-of-center media outlets, including The Daily Caller and Breitbart, in the company's search function."

The report said Google Vice President David Besbris jumped into that fight and "advocated providing contextual information about media sources in search results, and the company later did so with a short-lived fact check feature at the end of 2017."

"Not only did the fact-check feature target conservative outlets almost exclusively, it was also blatantly wrong. Google’s fact check repeatedly attributed false claims to those outlets, even though they demonstrably never made those claims," the Daily Caller reported.