Google Calendar removes Pride Month, cultural heritage months

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Feb 11, 2025 / 12:35 pm (CNA).

Google Calendar removed references to Pride Month, Black History Month, and all cultural heritage months on its web and mobile applications, instead opting to display only public federal holidays and national observances on its calendars.

The shift appears to coincide with similar moves from federal departments and agencies under President Donald Trump’s administration. However, a Google spokesperson said in a statement that the decision was made in mid-2024 and did not indicate ideological or cultural motivations for that change.

“For over a decade we’ve worked with timeanddate.com to show public holidays and national observances in Google Calendar,” a spokesperson for Google said in a statement provided to CNA. 

“Some years ago, the Calendar team started manually adding a broader set of cultural moments in a wide number of countries around the world,” the statement read. “We got feedback that some other events and countries were missing — and maintaining hundreds of moments manually and consistently globally wasn’t scalable or sustainable. So in mid-2024, we returned to showing only public holidays and national observances from timeanddate.com globally, while allowing users to manually add other important moments.”

Before the change, Google Calendar users would automatically have the start of “Pride Month” listed on their calendars for June 1. In June, the secular observance celebrates homosexuality and transgenderism. For Catholics, the month of June is dedicated to celebrating the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

Other observances that are no longer automatically displayed on Google Calendar include Black History Month, Hispanic Heritage Month, Indigenous Peoples’ Month, and Holocaust Remembrance Day, among others. It also included other celebrations unrelated to cultural identities, such as Teachers’ Day, which are no longer automatically listed on calendars.

A spokesperson for Google told CNA that the company will continue to celebrate and promote cultural moments in its products and specifically referenced Black History Month and the Lunar New Year. 

The holidays still automatically displayed include Christmas, Christmas Eve, Easter, Thanksgiving, Halloween, and Independence Day, among others, for American users.

Users can still manually add any holidays or observances to their calendars on the web and mobile applications. 

The Google spokesperson told CNA “it’s easy for Calendar users to customize which categories of holidays they show.”

This week, Google Maps also changed the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America for American users to reflect the name change ordered by Trump. For Mexican users, Google still labels the body of water as the Gulf of Mexico. Users in other countries see both names.

“We’ve received a few questions about naming within Google Maps,” the company said in a post on X before the name change was official. “We have a long-standing practice of applying name changes when they have been updated in official government sources.”

Late last month, the Department of Defense’s intelligence agency ended all observances of Pride Month and other cultural heritage months. This occurred after Trump signed an executive order to end all “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) practices in the federal government. 

The Department of State banned embassies from flying the “pride” flag and other ideological flags, establishing a policy that only the flag of the United States can be flown. The Department of Justice (DOJ) also ended the DOJ Pride office.

Source: https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/262147/google-calendar-removes-pride-month-cultural-heritage-months