Apparently Google is willing to begin wading into the culture wars, with this short statement on their official Blog.
The key bits from Sergey Brin:
It is the chilling and discriminatory effect of the proposition on many of our employees that brings Google to publicly oppose Proposition 8. 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. We hope that California voters will vote no on Proposition 8 -- we should not eliminate anyone's fundamental rights, whatever their sexuality, to marry the person they love.
While I'm generally very wary when a corporation is getting involved in politics -- particularly politics outside of their immediate business concerns -- I'm a touch less wary when they are on the right side.
I also wonder if Google is going to face any significant backlash from the Radical Right for this? Perhaps there will be a "Conservative" Search Engine to go along with the ever amusing Conservapedia.
In fact, Conservapedia writers have already noticed this and have added it to their page on Google:
In addition, although claiming to generally avoid getting involved in matters outside their field, Google officially supports the radical liberal cause of so-called "same sex marriage."
(I love Conservapedia -- it's like the Colbert Report, but funny)
Anyway, think of this as you use the internet today, and if you do any searching, take a gander at those ads on the right side of the page.