A trial has recently concluded in a California Federal Court over the issue of same sex marriage. The plaintiffs in Perry v. Schwarzenegger seek to overturn California’s gay marriage ban (Prop. 8th) Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The case is unique on many counts including the fact that the Judge conducted a full courtroom trial rather than a bare exchange of paper arguments. It is also unique in that the plaintiffs are represented by a well-known conservative attorney who has used the case to shape a fascinating conservative argument for same sex marriage.

Ted Olson is a conservative’s conservative. He was counsel to George W. Bush in Bush v. Gore and served as Bush’s Solicitor General. He defended Reagan in the Iran Contra scandal and assisted in the Paula Jones case against Bill Clinton. He is a founding member of the Federalist Society and a longtime critic of judicial activism. And he believes he has constructed a conservative case for gay marriage that can prevail before the current Supreme Court.

Don’t Ask Don ‘t Tell, challenges conservatives to come to terms with their idea of a strong military. Who should and should not serve? Should gays and lesbians in the military be allowed to speak out about their personal lives? Can they marry on base like straight soldiers? Currently, many gays have been discharged from service who were excellent soldiers and offered valuable skills such as weapons or language capabilities which should under ‘normal’ circumstance render them indispensable. Despite President Obama pledging to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, the pink vote has noticed his annoying tendency to waffle as he has done with so many other campaign promises he made to liberals.”

For most Republicans the history of abortion extends back no further than the Supreme Court’s 1973 judgment in Roe v. Wade that struck down state laws banning the practice. A better sense of where we came from might help us understand where we are and why we have been unable to reach a legislative compromise on this issue.

Abortion has been practiced for millennia and we have literary evidence of it going back to ancient Egypt and India. Classical doctors and philosophers wrote about abortion and the early Christian Church wrestled with the practice. It has been variously banned, approved, encouraged and curbed at different times and among different cultures.

I don’t have a problem with a black American-specific holiday, but my main issue with Kwanzaa concerns authenticity. Kwanzaa isn’t rooted in black American culture and experience. While the official Kwanzaa website calls it a “celebration of family, community, and culture”, why is the holiday a mishmash of East African cultures when the overwhelming majority of black Americans are of West African origin? Nor is it even a holiday that resides with Africans. Kwanzaa thus contributes to the stereotype that Africa is just one big blob, with few if any inter-country differences. This viewpoint is ironically a strange bedfellow of many white attitudes towards Africa, as if one can switch African cultures in and out at will. Black Americans should certainly learn more about Africa. However, Kwanzaa - with its misinformation about our African heritage - falls short of this goal.

At a time when African-Americans were deserting The Republican Party in favor of The Democrats, Edward Brooke of Massachusetts remained with The Republican Party becoming the first Black Attorney General of his state from 1962 to 1966. In 1966, he became the first African-American elected to the Senate since the end of Reconstruction and the beginning of the era of Jim Crow. He was also the first African-American elected to this position in the state of Massachusetts. While Senator Edward Brooke remained loyal to the Republican Party, however, he proved himself to be a renegade and highly individualistic in that the issues he supported were far more liberal than the stance which The Republican Party usually took on such issues including the laws in place which he needed to enforce as the Massachusett’s State Attorney General.

In Loving V. Virginia, Richard Loving who was Caucasian, and his wife, named Mildred loving who was of African and Native American Descent, sued the state of Virginia which had not only invalidated the Loving interracial union but had also forced the couple to leave the state of Virginia. The Loving couple won their case in 1967 with the Supreme Court saying that they could not tell Richard and Mildred whom to marry.

It is with great sadness, therefore, given the five hundred years of sexual racism which African Americans have been the primary victims of, that a Justice of the Peace named Keith Bardwell from Tangipahoa Parish, Louisiana feels that it is his God-given right and even, his duty as a Christian to refuse to marry interracial couples when one party is Caucasian and the other Negroid.

Mr. Bardwell has broken the law four times so far to date in Tangipahoa Parish with his latest victims being 30 year old Beth Humphrey and 32 year old Terence Mckay. Unlike the Loving Couple in 1967, for instance, .Humphrey is Caucasian while Mckay is Black. According to Mary Foster of The Associated Press, the couple were told by Bardwell on October 6th, 2009 that he would not sign a marriage license for an interracial couple. The reason he cited for his refusal is because the children from such unions are not happy because they are usually not accepted by either The African-American Community nor by the Caucasian Community.

It is not easy to be a Black Republican and it’s damn near impossible to be a black, gay Republican.

James Farmer Jr. is, perhaps, most well-known as the founder of The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) whose tactics were the backbone of The Civil Rights Movement. Having been influenced by the passive, non-violent resistance techniques of Mohandas K. Gandhi of India, Farmer imparted the principles of non-violent resistance to his disciples drilling into them the error of using aggression in The Civil Rights Movement

Johnson was an active Republican Party Member having served, beginning in 1904, as both The Treasurer and a year later The President of The Colored Republican Club. He strongly, therefore, identified with the self-help policies of Booker T. Washington.

By Dr. Ada Fisher
Now that we have bailed out the banks, could it be as Fayetteville, NC conservative talk show host David Taylor suggested that we are letting the auto industry flounder because a car gives you a potential source of equity to borrow against.  By making it so that you can only get money through banks which are being socialized whether or not we want to call them such, this talk show host argues that banks and the Federal Reserve are being allowed to drown the economy and consumers in worthless money thereby controlling your access to cash without …

By Javier E. David 
Chrisette Michele, the immensely talented R&B chanteuse with a versatile yet powerhouse voice, has been something of a difficult sell to mainstream audiences. One might argue that this jazz-tinged singer’s career has been hampered by a mercurial music industry that more than often not, tends to rewards oversexed pop-tarts with wafer-thin vocal abilities (no offense, Ciara [http://www.thonline.com/article.cfm?id=243418]). 
Despite the disappointing commercial success of her stylish debut album “I Am,” a setback that might have caused a different singer to conform to mainstream tastes in order to move units, Michele remained true to her abilities, and in the process …

By Star
And that show’s your stupidity.
I’m sorry to be so harsh, but it’s the way it is. We are not a society that values every human life. We are giving and strong, we always want to help the victim. The aggressor is overlooked, maybe punished, but definitely overlooked. At least until it’s time to make the movie.
I talked to my niece this weekend. She was singing Chris Brown and I asked her what she thought about Chris Brown and Rhianna. She told me, “I’d take him if she didn’t want him”. So, I asked my cousin what he would do …

By Tiffany Shorter
Published January 2009
I look forward to Michelle Obama becoming the new First Lady  because she and her family represents not only the ideal American family, but also the ideal black American family. Historically, African American families have been weaken due to slavery making it possible for families members to be sold separately to different plantations.
Although slavery and segregation has ended, the African American community continues to struggle with building strong families ties. Over 40% of black men and women have never married and about 70 percent of children are born out of wedlock. Many black Republicans want to …

                  By Cleo Brown
Although housing is a basic need of life, Helen, a college- educated mother of five, became homeless in 1993 after she divorced her husband of thirteen years and lost custody of their children. 
Compounding Helen’s descent into homelessness was the presence of a debilitating mental illness, which had, at its core, a fear of fire and, consequently, a fear of living indoors.  Helen remained homeless until 2004 when she was both helped by expert psychiatric care, counseling, and medications as well as by a low income housing development which accepted her as a client although Helen believed that she …

By Cleo Brown
Last Summer, I attended a mental health conference at which topics such as stigma and retraumitization were discussed. Most of the presenters seemed to agree that because of the stigma associated with mental illness, often, mental illness in human beings goes undiagnosed and untreated. Consequently, Cathy, a world-class athlete from Ohio began to self-medicate through a diet of alcohol and pills eventually loosing her scholarship to college and her placement on the athletic circuit.Although Cathy’s was, ultimately, a success story in which she overcame child abuse, drug addiction, and paranoid schizophrenia to graduate from college; become a mother; …