There are good reasons for keeping one's personal life personal. If Sergey's comments cause a lot of controversy, I wouldn't be surprised if Google saw successful shareholder lawsuits. Using your company to comment on social issues is not acting in the fiduciary interest of your shareholders.
Never. Neither does In-N-Out, another privately owned "openly" christian company.
Staying private is one good way to alleviate issues with upset share holders and continuing to passively support the owners beliefs. This is fine as long as the company still respects the rights of the share holders, customers and employees.
As many have already stated, and i'll reiterate. There are two issues being discussed here. 1) gay rights. [no question they should have equal rights] 2) entangling support for social issues with a public company [this is where people have problems].
All the publicly held multi-national companies that I know of offer benefits to a homosexual partner. But they do it through the normal workflow of HR. The problem is Google does everything differently. Including making this announcement. So the question remains is this an acceptable way to do it? Google thinks so. (now my libertarian free market tendancies come in to play) If you support the way they did it, buy some more Google and give them a positive blog article. If you disagree sell it or short it and go use duckduckgo or yahoo.
And for those saying companies don't take sides or make announcements, lets name a couple. Chick-fil-a is closed on Sundays. Why, because the founder is a hard-right Christian who thinks everyone should go to church or they go to hell. I worked there when I was a teenager, firsthand experience.
How about Dominos? The founder built a town outside of Naples in Florida strictly for Christians. Ava Maria, I think its called.
And don't forget SC Johnson, "a family company". Jeesh.