Actually, the multi-hued halo hovering over the president also serves to mock the institutional Catholic Church, which is hardly a friend of the gay community and a frequent target of the “media elite.” Well done!
The greatest impact of the nifty Newsweek cover will occur in the great American heartland, and serve as a measure of revenge for Obama’s unfortunate 2008 characterization of small towns in Pennsylvania and the Midwest.
He called those towns “places where the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing [has] replaced them. And it's not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
Those good people probably won’t even read the Newsweek ode of Obama’s evolution—finally—on same sex marriage that was penned by Brown’s fellow Brit, Andrew Sullivan. Just hanging the cover on the walls of the local VFW post or Elks/Moose Lodge will do the trick and perhaps deliver just enough votes in swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Iowa and Florida to make Mitt Romney the next president.
Tina, you could have been more subtle like the gang at The New Yorker. They put a White House adorned with rainbow columns on their May 21 cover. The cover was called a head-scratching “Spectrum of Light.” Conde Nast, parent of New Yorker, is already pitching 9x12 versions of the cover for a cool $125 a pop.
Or even better, you could have shunned the gay marriage furor like your rival Rick Stengel at Time. His cover of a three-year-old boy standing on a stool to breastfeed on his mother has as much “shock value” as Newsweek's without the political impact.
It’s understandable that hard-pressed Time and Newsweek are relying on shock covers to hike newsstand sales. It’s the “tabloidization” of the weeklies trends. In the race to the bottom, the sleaziest will survive. Good luck, Tina.
Perhaps, Brown anticipated the millions in reprint dollars from orders by Team Romney and anti-Obama SuperPacs to make sure that those Moose lodges are stocked with Newsweek magazines to dress up their walls to remind members and their families that president Obama was crowned gay president by the snobs in New York.
There will be payback time in November.
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