awesomefrench:

FRANCE IS THE 14Th COUNTRY TO ALLOW GAY MARRIAGE!

Liberté! Egalité! Fraternité!

(via newsweek-paris-france)

“Treating same-sex partnerships differently from husband-wife marriages only serves to divide and antagonize those who ought to be working together.” - David Frum, explaining why he signed the Republican brief supporting gay marriage. 

[Photo: Ben Margot/AP]

I can’t get inside his head. I don’t know why he did it. I can’t speak for why he brought me into it. The fact of the matter is he did.

Dee Coram, 44-year-old owner of the Coffee Trader in Montrose, Colorado, whose father cast the deciding vote in a bill that would allow civil unions. The 5-4 vote, the younger Coram added, has taken “more of an emotional toll on him than myself.”

Ah, our favorite nwktumblr feature is back: the also-rans! These are the alternate versions of our ’First Gay President’ Newsweek cover that were left on the cutting room floor.

Which one’s your favorite? Your tumblrs are really digging Oliver Munday’s #2, but also like the simplicity #6 (the quote over white) brings to the table.

If you haven’t read Andrew Sullivan’s amazing cover story, now’s the time!

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Here’s the start of Andrew Sullivan’s cover story on Obama coming around to gay marriage equality. You should read the whole thing—especially if you’re prone to judge a book by its cover.

It was the spring of 2007, back when Barack Obama’s bid for the presidency seemed quixotic at best. I’d seen Obama speak to a crowd and was impressed but wanted to see if what I’d seen from afar held up under closer scrutiny. So I asked to attend a private fundraiser in a tony apartment in Georgetown. I promised not to write anything. I just wanted to see the man up close and get a better sense of him and his character. At one point in the question-and-answer session, a woman looked him square in the eyes with what can only be called maternal grit. “My son is gay,” she said, and the room went suddenly quiet. “I don’t understand why you don’t support his right to marry the person he loves. It’s so disappointing to me.” Obama, without losing eye contact for a second, told her: “I want full equality for your son—all the rights and benefits that marriage brings. I really do. But the word ‘marriage’ stirs up so much religious feeling. I think civil unions are the way to go. As long as they are equal.”

My heart sank. Was this obviously humane African-American actually advocating a “separate but equal” solution—a form of marital segregation like the one that made his own parents’ marriage a felony in many states when he was born? Hadn’t he already declared he supported marriage equality when he was running for the Illinois Senate in 1996? (The administration now claims that the questionnaire from the gay Chicago paper Outlines had been answered in type—not Obama’s writing—by somebody else.) Hadn’t Jeremiah Wright’s church actually been a rare supporter of marriage equality among black churches? The sudden equivocation made no sense—except as pure political calculation. And yet it also felt strained, as if he knew it didn’t quite fit. He wanted equality but not marriage—but you cannot have one without the other. On this issue, Obama’s excruciating nonposition was essentially “Yes we can’t.” And yet somehow, simply by the way he answered that mother’s question, I didn’t believe it. I thought he was struggling between political calculation and his core belief in civil rights. And it was then that I realized he was both: a cold, steely, ruthless, calculating politician who nonetheless wanted to do the right thing in the end.

Last week he did it—in a move whose consequences are simply impossible to judge. White House sources told me that after the interview with ABC News, the president felt as if a weight had been lifted off him. Yes, he was bounced into it by Joe Biden, the lovable Irish-Catholic rogue who couldn’t help but tell the truth about his own views on TV (only to be immediately knocked down by David Axelrod on Twitter). But Obama had been planning to endorse gay marriage before his reelection for a while. White House sources say that if Obama had been a state senator in New York last year when the Albany legislature legalized gay marriage, he’d have voted in favor. But no one asked. The “make news” reveal was scheduled for The View. In the end, scrambling to catch up with his veep, he turned to his fellow ESPN fan, Robin Roberts, a Christian African-American from Mississippi, to quell the sudden kerfuffle. Even this was calculated: to have this moment occur between two African-Americans would help Obama calm opposition within parts of the black community.

The interview, by coincidence, came the day after North Carolina voted emphatically to ban all rights for gay couples in the state constitution. For gay Americans and their families, the emotional darkness of Tuesday night became a canvas on which Obama could paint a widening dawn. But I didn’t expect it. Like many others, I braced myself for disappointment. And yet when I watched the interview, the tears came flooding down. The moment reminded me of my own wedding day. I had figured it out in my head, but not my heart. And I was utterly unprepared for how psychologically transformative the moment would be. To have the president of the United States affirm my humanity—and the humanity of all gay Americans—was, unexpectedly, a watershed. He shifted the mainstream in one interview. And last week, a range of Democratic leaders—from Harry Reid to Steny Hoyer—backed the president, who moved an entire party behind a position that only a few years ago was regarded as simply preposterous. And in response, Mitt Romney could only stutter.

Keep reading! Andrew Sullivan on Barack Obama: The First Gay President, Newsweek

Here’s our cover this week, featuring a rainbow-haloed Barack Obama—America’s first gay president!

Obama came out for gay marriage, so Jon Stewart had a little party on last night’s Daily Show. 

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 full quote. (via nprfreshair)

(Source: NPR, via nprfreshair)

The president of the United States: now in the 21st century.

Fox News’ Shepard Smith, just a few minutes ago.