Murmurs of an ancestry.com boycott have been breezing through the LGBT blogosphere and community since late last week when an ancestry.com user, James Helms, attempted to add his same-sex partner, Devon, to his family tree using the online version of ancestry.com’s Family Tree Maker.  After unsuccessfully attempting to add Devon to his family tree without labeling Devon as his “wife”, James emailed ancestry.com’s member support department.  The response from Spencer at Member Services added fuel to the already raging fire in the LGBT community:

Please note that same-gender relationships are unable to be entered in our genealogy software (either the Online Family Tree of [sic] the Ancestry Family Tree). This is because genealogy trees are intended to trace biological relationships or bloodlines. As two persons of the same gender are unable to have biological children, they cannot be entered as spouses or partners.

James later posted the text of the emails on the forum at gaywallet.com and the blogosphere responded noting, accurately, that adoptive children are not biological relatives and can be added to the family tree and spouses with no children can be added in spite of a lack of biological relationships.

Tim Sullivan, CEO of The Generations Network (the parent company of ancestry.com) stepped forward in a telephone conference with jaysays.com to clarify the company’s position on representing same-sex relationships in the family unit.  When asked whether the company intends to release an update to ancestry.com so that same-sex relationships can be recognized, Mr. Sullivan stated,

Our desktop software application called Family Tree Maker, which [in addition] to ancestry is one of our key businesses, is built in a way that permits this, and we’ve recognized for some time that we absolutely want the service to reflect how anyone defines spousal relationship or how anyone defines a family.

He added that they expect ancestry.com to support same-gender relationships and all family stories by the end of the first quarter of 2009.

Mr. Sullivan acknowledged that there has been a healthy debate within the genealogical community as to whether a family tree should be representative of the biological lineage of a family, or the family’s story and attributed the response from member support to this debate.  He further stated that ancestry.com is attempting to “evolve” their service to allow people to build their family story online.

Mr. Sullivan wanted the record to be clear with respect to the ownership of ancestry.com,

We [The Generations Network] have absolutely no ownership affiliation with the LDS Church.  We have a very diverse management team.  We are owned primarily by a private equity investment group in the bay area called Spectrum Equity Investors and they, sort of partnering with the management team about a year ago, did a buy-out of the company.

He went on to state,

[This company and I] are absolutely committed, absolutely committed, to having our service be a welcoming and appropriate venue for anyone to define their family the way they choose to define it without bias.  I would view any call to boycott ancestry as based in misunderstanding, miscommunication and misinformation.  And we are absolutely committed to supporting same-gender relationships full stop, period.

The San Francisco Chronicle has provided a searchable database of all contributors to the Proposition 8 campaign.  A search of the top executives for The Generations Network revealed that no executive individually made contributions to the Yes on 8 Campaign.

Author’s Note and Commentary:

There are many lessons to be learned from the call to arms against ancestry.com.  The most pressing of which is that Customer Service Representative’s personal ideology and not necessarily corporate policy may influence their response to questions involving the LGBT community.  Like most, I was infuriated by the response from the member services department and was ready with my figurative pen to fight the battle for equal recognition.  I almost allowed my fury to negate my reason.

In doing research for this story, I expected that I would be writing a piece about the evil corporation who defines the family unit as a biological unit with no consideration for same-gender relationships.  I expected another notch to be placed in the column for “hate institution.”  Instead, I found a company that is evolving in such a way that we can all share our family story.

As a blogger, I use Goggle AdSense to help offset the costs of web-hosting and my time (granted I make about a penny per hour using this route).  AdSense allows you to use competitive ad filtering so competitor’s ads do not show up on your website; however, I often find myself playing a game of chase to keep ads from companies and programs that discriminate against LGBT people from appearing on jaysays.com.

I recently noticed that ads for the Yes on 8 campaign from the Protect Family people were showing up on my website as well as some for “conversion therapy”.  I was mortified and immediately ran over to google to filter their ads from appearing here.  The rat race continues.  Since I’m normally accessing my site’s back-end and rarely pay much attention to the ads being displayed, its possible ads I don’t want to appear will appear - or do I want them to appear after all?

I found a way which we, the LGBT community can hit the companies in their wallets by making them pay us, the gay bloggers, and google.  Most ads are pay for impression or pay per click type ads.  Therefore, I decided we as a community should actively seek out these ads online, particularly ads placed on LGBT friendly websites that are from discriminatory companies and get click happy with them.  Each time an LGBT person clicks on these ads, the advertiser has to pay for that click - in same cases I get $0.36 for a click - Google takes a portion too.  The click thus costs at least $0.36.  Now imagine we get click happy… click click click 100, 200, 300 times amongst many many people - we could cost them a small fortune.  It costs us a little time, but we take from their advertising budget and give the money to those people they are preaching against (LGBT bloggers).  We can clean up their “blood money”.

Please note, I request that you do not do this on jaysays.com as actively requesting people to click on your ads is a violation of the terms of service of Google AdSense.  Please only do this on other sites or from google searches which produce ads for these companies and organizations.

The problem for me with being a blogger is that I always feel like I need to upgrade or change the appearance of my blog to keep it interesting.  This is a swell idea.  Regrettably, this resulted in me removing a significant amount of jaysays.com.  I have text backups of all the posts dating back to… gosh… I don’t know.. 200 AD or so, back when I, not Al Gore, invented the internet.

For those who may come looking for a specific post from days gone by, so sorry.  I hope to have the bulk of it back up soon.  Also, every user account has been deleted… so much for database back-ups.  Please feel free to re-register.

Next update and complete deletion of everything scheduled for —– NEVER AGAIN.

Although, I am learning to use After Effects and found a way to create a really neat glowing logo…

I’ve made an observation as a perspective former Windows Vista user who is generally considered to be computer smart. I’m considering *upgrading* to OpenSuse. I reviewed the Live CD but couldn’t get some software to install and somewhere in my head some magical thing happened and I thought, well, guess I better install the full edition.   I did so, and then began sorting through the enormous amount of new terminology like: repositories; command line; GNOME; KDE and a plethora of other things I’d never claim to understand.  I’ve read everything I can think of to read and then some… So, knowing that the following will result in a lot of hate mail from all sorts of Dungeons and Dragons folks…. here is what I’ve learned (or haven’t learned):

• Linux people are way too smart to write tutorials and certainly should not try to put together a simple installation guide - it’s complex and there are too many choices.
  
• Linux people are outrageously snobbish when it comes to their computer preferences. It’s not if it works, but rather, anything else is rubbish…
• A step by step screen shot guide stating “choose this option” is impossible or “do this” because the OS is so customizable.
  
• GNOME or KDE – how should I know which one I prefer, particularly when everyone is so certain that their opinion is RIGHT.
• WTF is all this talk about the command lines and where in the world do you type them?  I tried in BOTH Command Prompt programs installed on my OpenSuse 11.0 with GNOME Desktop (damn that’s a lot to say).  Both times I was told the command “make” does not exist.  Uhm… that’s what the tutorials said to type?
• To install my computer hardware with Opensuse I have to know way too much about the hardware, including things like manufacturer, version numbers, if the firmware is firm????
• To install my wireless card from Broadcom I apparently need ndiswrapper which is impossible to install based upon the tutorial distributed with the download (see command line problems above)  When you put it in the command prompt (I call it that due to windows comfort zone and I can’t remember what linux folks call it) you get an error message… it’s not like I know what “ls /blah/blah blah –r /ndiswrapper to the power of 60 with a test of lime” does as a command.
• The GUI is no more impresive or less impressive than any other GUI and all the focus on “pretty” things makes me crazy. I just expect performance.
• Too many decisions have to be made for Linux to ever replace Mac OS or Windows. All the options are very overwhelming - even to dorks like me who love options…
• What should I do about partition based or LVM based and what is LVM and what the hell does it matter?
• A swap Partition? Seriously… what the hell is that and why when trying to specify partitions does it appear that I have a much larger harddrive than I actually do? How is it partitioning space that doesn’t exist.
• Installing and using Linux can drive a sane person to murder a herd of nuns using a toothpick and a can of raid – for which I’m very very sorry.
• Once installed and played with for hours upon hours, my computer is still unusable, I don’t have wireless networking, I can’t connect to my work network even with the wire plugged in and I have 20% less hair than when I started.  Further, the Linux install did not overwrite my Vista installation and when I tried to delete the partition with windows I received a rather threatening message saying it’s ok to do that, but it’s not recommended.  What!?!?!  WHAT!??!!  Why would I do something you don’t recommend when I know nothing about your software (is it ok to call it software or will I get hate mail from Linux folks?)
  
• To no longer use Windows, I’m spending an awful lot of time trying to find and install software to emulate windows or allow windows drivers to work with my hardware.
• Linux has apparently never heard of Plug and Play.
  
• ITS SO NOT WORTH THE EFFORT.

Options are generally a good thing.  For example, would you like the grey shirt or the blue shirt?  But if asked if you would like any one of several hundred different shirts, it may take a while to decide.  So, if you are a Windows user looking for an alternate OS, be warned.  Even computer dorks like myself can’t handle the annoyance of changing.  Now… I have to figure out how to uninstall Linux…