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Source: Hiphop-n-more.com

I can’t tell yet if President Obama’s really started something with black male rappers and acceptance of homosexuality or if these stars are just being trendy, but after Jay-Z expressed his support of the POTUS’ controversial same-sex marriage stance, T.I. has done the same.

In an interview with MTV’s RapFix Live, TIP made it clear that the push for gay couples to be able to marry is a non-issue for him.

“Just to speak honestly and being frank, I don’t care,” he told Sway. “I think that if a matter doesn’t affect your daily life, you shouldn’t take a hard stand on it. If it’s not something that directly affects you, if it doesn’t affect you, what difference does it make to you what other people are doing with their lives?

“I think that you should be able to do whatever you want to do,” T.I. remarked. “I don’t see how it matters one way or another.”

Although Tip hasn’t been able to vote for the past several years due to being on probation since his 2007 weapons arrest, this September his probation will be lifted and when he was asked who he was voting for he responded:

“I don’t think that’s a hard question….Obama.”

When we think about it, there are only a handful of rappers who really matter in the game right now and I wonder if T.I. and Jay-Z’s endorsement of same-sex marriage will start to peel back the anti-homophobic layers covering hip-hop. There’s a big difference between saying I don’t care what they’re doing over there and backing a gay or lesbian rapper but if these guys openly support homosexuality in one form they better be ready to accept it in another if confronted with it.

What do you think? Are T.I. and Jay-Z being trendy or could they really bring about change?

Brande Victorian is a blogger and culture writer in New York City. Follower her on Twitter at @be_vic.

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Source: Eurweb.com

From Eurweb.com

President Barack Obama’s appearance on” The View” this week gave the show a 15-month ratings high, according to Deadline.com.

His Tuesday visit, where he spoke about topics like Wall Street reform and his recently announced support for gay marriage, drew 4.7 million viewers, according to Nielsen.

It was his fourth visit to the ABC morning talk show and the first of his re-election campaign.

See how the president fared on a pop culture challenge at Eurweb.com.

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Source: religion.blogs.cnn.com

Question: Why is the news obsessed with what the black community thinks about same sex marriage?

I mean, they don’t ask the community about their feelings on the economy. Nor are we invited to share our thoughts on topics related to foreign affairs. But every since President Obama pledged his support for same sex marriage the spotlight has been put onto black community as political pundits and journalists alike wait with baited breath to hear what we think about it.

I don’t know about the rest of yall but I’m kind of offended. Two months ago, when the Black community was all a huff over the Trayvon Martin case, I don’t recall CNN or MSNBC rushing to get a comment from the likes of GLAAD and the Human Rights Coalition. Sure both groups did put out statements taking a strong stand against the injustices around the Martin case. But those statements never made it to the press. Nor were their cameras in what could be classified as traditional “gay spaces” asking them their opinions on Zimmerman’s guilt or innocence. I’m willing to bet though, that if a poll were done, like the many CBS/NBC/Gallop/New York Times polls we’ve seen about the black reaction to Obama’s announcement, we probably too would see a diversity of thought from the LGBT community including those who supported justice for the Martin family to those who downright thought he had it coming. I mean, just because you are gay, doesn’t mean that you can’t be racist.

Of course, it would be illogical to think that if a number of gay and lesbian, transgender and bisexual folks believe that Zimmerman was innocent than the entire LBGT community must be condemned. But that is what is happening to the black community now on the issue of same sex marriage. No matter how internally diverse we are, in the eyes of the mainstream it is one for all and all for one. The obvious explanation is that this is an attempt to drive a wedge – or at least exploit a supposed wedge issue that is already there – between the two communities, especially considering that the long standing narrative is that black voters let their Bible-thumping ways get in the way of any sense of justice for the LGBT community.  We’ve seen that vilification of black folks in 2008 with the passage of California Prop 8 and we see it most recently in North Carolina with Amendment One – even as new evidences proved that other factors such as geographical location of the voters and generational differences in attitudes proved to be much more determining factors than actual race.

But the media needs its villains and scapegoats. And instead of putting the blame squarely on the state and federal governments, who choose to derail or flat out refuse to enforce the basic promise of equality under the 14th Amendment, they use the tried and true arguments of state rights and majority wins, which is as old as struggle for equality itself.  First off, black folks have never been that politically powerful. And secondly, do you honestly think if a law, in regards to civil rights for black folks, were on the ballot today it would pass by the majority? Heck no, that’s why federal mandates were created to force the hands of states, who seek to deny people basic rights.

But all of that is secondary to the discussion at hand. More to my point: black people are a monolithic group, similar in kind to the Borg from Star Trek.  We look alike, talk alike and therefore must think alike – at least by the mainstream media standards. Never mind the hundreds of free thinkers, black intellectuals, college professors, and ordinary blacks who’ve spent their entire lives either living or pondering on the intersection between being Black and being gay. Their views don’t matter. The only opinions that do matter belong to those, who the media has deemed the sole authority on the black experience: mainly the Southern black conservative church.

For the last few days since President Obama’s announcement, many mainstream news media, along with several black media outlets have been tripping over themselves to parade every single conservative preacher, Deacon and brother in a Christian barbershop in front of the cameras to give their brimstone and fire accounts of why President Obama and “the gays” are going to Hell. These people are scary and often feed into the political theater that the black community is largely homophobic, thus throwing their support for President Obama’s reelection campaign in jeopardy. It’s good fodder for 24-hour news stations, whose main objective is ratings, but bad for our community, who just can’t escape having our thoughts and images marginalized to fit someone else’s agenda.

Source: Black Voices.com

From Black Voices.com

There were plenty of black ministers who spoke out against President Obama’s stance on marriage equality and the media was happy to interview them. But there’s another side to this story. There are black and Latino ministers who strongly support the president and his newly stated stance.

Support for marriage equality among African American and Latino groups has increased over the past few years. A recent Public Religion Research Institute poll found that a majority of Latino Catholics and a third of black Protestants support marriage equality.

See who these men and women of God are at BlackVoices.com

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Source: Eurweb.com

These magazines are getting more and more salacious as the days go on. First there was Time’s controversial breastfeeding cover and now Newsweek is following suit with a cover crowning President Obama as the “first gay president.” Clearly, President Obama is heterosexual so the cover with its headline is rubbing people the wrong way. One news anchor on CNN even argued that since some people still believe that the president is not a Christian and that he wasn’t born in this country, when he’s presented evidence to the contrary, is it really wise to make yet another false statement about him?

Let us know what you think about the cover and check out what the author of the cover story, openly gay political blogger Andrew Sullivan, had to say about President Obama’s announcement and what effect it had on him at Eurweb.com. 

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Taking a break from her busy responsibilities as a single mother, 21-year-old Bristol Palin took a moment to write a blog post criticizing President Obama’s support of gay marriage today. Unfortunately she didn’t take enough time to consider the hypocrisy of what she wrote when she questioned how much Obama’s daughters, Malia and Sasha, influenced his coming out of support so to speak. She wrote:

“While it’s great to listen to your kids’ ideas, there’s also a time when dads simply need to be dads,” wrote Palin.

She continued, “In this case, it would’ve been helpful for him to explain to Malia and Sasha that while her friends parents are no doubt lovely people, that’s not a reason to change thousands of years of thinking about marriage. Or that – as great as her friends may be – we know that in general kids do better growing up in a mother/father home. Ideally, fathers help shape their kids’ worldview.”

Ah, the old, ‘but we’ve been doing it this way forever’ logic. Ever heard of progression, Bristol? I’m more concerned with why she’s not nearly half as invested in thinking about the fatherly lessons her child is missing out on while her baby daddy Levi Johnston focuses on his “modeling” career, tell-all book, and coming baby with his new chick. If needing a mother and a father in the home and tradition are the only arguments she has, I’d say she lost this round, although she does come up with another interesting justification for why President Obama declared his support of gay marriage: TV.

“In this case, it would’ve been nice if the President would’ve been an actual leader and helped shape their thoughts instead of merely reflecting what many teenagers think after one too many episodes of Glee.”

And with that I would like to thank Bristol for her not well thought-out entertainment today. Your job is done and you have successfully earned all the seats in Alaska that your mother is not currently occupying.

Check out her entire blog post and the 352 readers and counting who are going in on her here. What do you think about what she wrote?

Brande Victorian is a blogger and culture writer in New York City. Follower her on Twitter at @be_vic.

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Source: Eurweb

From Eurweb.com

*In the first 90 minutes after news of President Obama’s support of gay marriage Wednesday, his campaign banked $1 million in spontaneous contributions, according to BuzzFeed.

“This is beyond unifying — it’s electrifying,” said Eugene Sepulveda, a former fundraiser for Obama who withdrew to take a non-political job early this year. “This man stands for right, despite the political consequences.”

Jeff Soref, a longtime Democratic activist in the gay community, told BuzzFeed: “I think the people who were disappointed by the president’s failure to support marriage quality will now have that barrier removed for them.”

Indeed, top gay donors have been using their expensive access to bend Obama’s ear on the issue for years. Some now feel that their specific pleas have been answered.

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Source:Washingtonpost.com

Just a short while ago news broke that Barack Obama just made another heroic first as president: He became the first seated Commander-in-Chief of the country to openly support gay marriage. The announcement came via an interview President Obama did with ABC’s Robin Roberts in which he made a clear declaration that he believes homosexual Americans should have the same right to marry as heterosexuals. He stated:

“I have to tell you that over the course of several years as I have talked to friends and family and neighbors when I think about members of my own staff who are in incredibly committed monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together, when I think about those soldiers or airmen or marines or sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf and yet feel constrained, even now that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is gone, because they are not able to commit themselves in a marriage, at a certain point I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married.”

The president’s “I do” to gay marriage rattled through the Internet with several celebrities—both gay and straight—sending out resounding support and thanks to the president for taking such a bold stance. But regardless of President Obama’s seemingly altruistic goal of wanting to support same-sex couples and families, making the announcement was certainly a gamble, and a decision that definitely wasn’t made without thoroughly assessing the risk-benefit ratio.

The thing is gay marriage is nearly as polar an issue as capital punishment or abortion. You’re either starkly for it or against it and the ramifications can be great. The homosexual population has grown as a powerful entity in society and it makes sense that the president would want to openly align his candidacy with the belief gay couples should be allowed to marry, because although his position does nothing to affect state legislature regarding marriage laws, it does potentially boost his vote with the gay population. On the other hand, it could wreck his stance with those who do not have such liberal views on gay marriage. Already there have been comments on news and blog boards from past supporters of Obama saying he has now lost their vote. They hardly feel his declaration is bold, but rather a cowardly buckling to pressure from the homosexual community.

As far as conservatives go, there likely wasn’t much Obama could do to change their minds to vote for him anyway, and though some believe this issue will now be one of the main points of contention in the coming race, it wouldn’t be wise for Republicans to openly bash the president’s support of gay marriage knowing how many votes ride on that. Besides, the president believes this is no longer a bi-partisan issue but rather a generational one. He told Robin:

 “You know when I go to college campuses, sometimes I talk to college Republicans who think that I have terrible policies on the economy, on foreign policy, but are very clear that when it comes to same sex equality or, you know, believe in equality. They are much more comfortable with it. You know, Malia and Sasha, they have friends whose parents are same-sex couples. There have been times where Michelle and I have been sitting around the dinner table and we’re talking about their friends and their parents and Malia and Sasha, it wouldn’t dawn on them that somehow their friends’ parents would be treated differently. It doesn’t make sense to them and frankly, that’s the kind of thing that prompts a change in perspective.”

President Obama has clearly laid his perspective out on the line and it will be a few months before we see the full ramifications of that choice. Beyond the gay-straight divide he’s crossed, many are curious as to how this open acceptance of same-sex couples will affect the president’s relationship with the black and Latino communities which across the board are thought to not be as on-board with gay marriage. Many have felt the president has the black vote in his back pocket but this could potentially change the game.

Do you think Obama just sealed his fate as the president for the next four years by supporting gay marriage or will he lose support for standing for this controversial right?

Brande Victorian is a blogger and culture writer in New York City. Follower her on Twitter at @be_vic.

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Source: Thegloss.com

You never know when your romantic past is going to creep up on you and for Barack Obama that day is fast approaching. Next month, Simon & Schuster is preparing to release a biography of the president titled, Barack Obama: The Story, by David Maraniss, and the author delves extensively into the experiences that made Barack Obama who he is today, particularly his past relationships with Alex McNear and Genevieve Cook, two women the President dated in the 1980s while he was a student at Columbia.

Drawing on Alex’s letters and Genevieve’s journals, David Maraniss paints a picture of a young man wise beyond his years, yet struggling to form an identity. Vanity Fair has published an excerpt from the book online and here are a few snippets of the insight into his young romances.

“The loneliness of Obama’s New York existence emerged in his letters to Alex McNear, a young woman from Occidental who had enchanted Obama when she was co-editing the literary magazine Feast, and with whom he reconnected when she spent the summer of 1982 in New York. Alex had always been fond of Barry, as she called him, and “thought he was interesting in a very particular way. He really worked his way through an idea or question, turned it over, looked at it from all sides, and then he came to a precise and elegant conclusion.” When Alex came to New York, she gave Obama a call. They met at an Italian restaurant on Lexington Avenue, and, as she remembered the night, “we sat and talked and ate and drank wine. Or at least I drank wine. I think he drank something stronger. It was one of those dark, old Italian restaurants that don’t exist in New York anymore. It was the kind of place where they leave you alone. I remember thinking how happy I felt just talking to him, that I could talk to him for hours. We walked slowly back to my apartment, on 90th, and said good-bye. After that we started spending much more time together.

“Alex remembered it as a summer of walking miles through the city, lingering over meals at restaurants, hanging out at their apartments, visiting art museums, and talking about life. She recalled one intense conversation in particular as they stood outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Obama was obsessed with the concept of choice, she said. Did he have real choices in his life? Did he have free will? How much were his choices circumscribed by his background, his childhood, his socio-economic situation, the color of his skin, the expectations that others had of him? How did choice influence his pres­ent and future? Later, referring back to that discussion, he told Alex in a letter that he had used the word “choice” “as a convenient shorthand for the way my past resolves itself. Not just my past, but the past of my ancestors, the planet, the universe.” His obsession with the concept of choice, he said in a later interview at the White House, “was a deliberate effort on my part to press the pause button, essentially, and try to orient myself and say, ‘Okay, which way, where am I going?’

“The long-distance relationship with Alex McNear after that summer—they would drift apart as time wore on—was conducted mostly through a series of passionate letters sent between his apartment (he was then living at 339 East 94th, in Manhattan) and hers, at 2210 Ridgeview Avenue, in Eagle Rock, California. By her account, the passion was as much about ideas and words as about their romance—what she later called “that dance of closeness through language.”

In December 1993, President Obama met Genevieve at a Christmas party at the age of 22, and it’s clear from her journal entries that they were pretty smitten with each other from day one.

“He noticed her accent. Australian, she said. He knew many Aussies, friends of his mother’s, because he had lived in Indonesia when he was a boy. So had she, before her parents divorced, and again briefly in high school. As it turned out, their stays in Jakarta had overlapped for a few years, starting in 1967. They talked nonstop, moving from one subject to another, sharing an intense and immediate affinity, enthralled by the randomness of their meeting and how much they had in common. They had lived many places but never felt at home.

“At night’s end, as Genevieve recalled that first encounter when I spoke with her decades later, they exchanged phone numbers on scraps of paper. “I’m pretty sure we had dinner maybe the Wednesday after. I think maybe he cooked me dinner. Then we went and talked in his bedroom. And then I spent the night. It all felt very inevitable.

“Genevieve’s journal-keeping started in 1975 during her final year at Emma Willard School, an academically rigorous prep school for young women in Troy, New York, and continued through her undergraduate years at Swarthmore and on into adulthood. As the relationship began, Genevieve was taken by Barack’s mind and the vibrancy of their discussions. Day by day, week by week, her perceptions of him became more complicated:”

Sunday, January 22, 1984
What a startling person Barack is—so strange to voice intimations of my own perceptions—have them heard, responded to so on the sleeve. A sadness, in a way, that we are both so questioning that original bliss is dissipated—but feels really good not to be faltering behind some façade—to not feel that doubt must be silenced and transmuted into distance.

Thursday, January 26
How is he so old already, at the age of 22? I have to recognize (despite play of wry and mocking smile on lips) that I find his thereness very threatening…. Distance, distance, distance, and wariness.

Sunday, February 19
Despite Barack’s having talked of drawing a circle around the tender in him—protecting the ability to feel innocence and springborn—I think he also fights against showing it to others, to me. I really like him more and more—he may worry about posturing and void inside but he is a brimming and integrated character.

Today, for the first time, Barack sat on the edge of the bed—dressed—blue jeans and luscious ladies on his chest [a comfy T-shirt depicting buxom women], the end of the front section of the Sunday Times in his hand, looking out the window, and the quality of light reflected from his eyes, windows of the soul, heart, and mind, was so clear, so unmasked, his eyes narrower than he usually holds them looking out the window, usually too aware of me.

Saturday, February 25
The sexual warmth is definitely there—but the rest of it has sharp edges and I’m finding it all unsettling and finding myself wanting to withdraw from it all. I have to admit that I am feeling anger at him for some reason, multi-stranded reasons. His warmth can be deceptive. Tho he speaks sweet words and can be open and trusting, there is also that coolness—and I begin to have an inkling of some things about him that could get to me.

When David spoke to the President for his book, he was well aware that the author would be reaching out to his exes and he didn’t seem to mind, asking with genuine curiosity how Genevieve was and what she was up to. At first I thought this book could raise the hair on the back of Michelle’s neck but thankfully these intimate portrayals are far more scholarly and introspective than scandalous. Sound’s like the president’s had it going on since back in the ’80s.

Are you going to check this new biography out?

Brande Victorian is a blogger and culture writer in New York City. Follower her on Twitter at @be_vic.

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President Barack Obama isn’t as funny as his wife Michelle, but he’s nothing to sneeze at either. We saw him partner with late night host, Jimmy Fallon and The Roots to slow jam the news. Sure, The Roots and Jimmy Fallon took care of the funnies but the President held his own by nodding and [awkwardly] dropping the mic at the end of the set. We love it! If this is how the race to White House is getting started, then Obama shouldn’t have a problem.

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