Our first black, foreign-born, gay president

Barack Obama is, of course, our first African-American president. According to the birthers, he is also our first foreign-born president. No, they still insist, he was not born in Hawaii, as his birth records prove beyond a reasonable doubt, but rather in Indonesia, or Kenya, or on Mars.

Last week, Newsweek featured Obama on its cover with a rainbow-colored halo above his head and declared him our first “gay president.” “I told you so, I told you so,” giggled his mortal enemies.

Conspiracy theorists aside, the majority of us understand that Obama is not gay, but he became the first American president to openly support equal rights for gay people, including marriage. In doing so, he electrified the liberal left, which was wavering in its support for the president because, they said, he’s too conservative. Meanwhile, right-wing conservatives say he’s a socialist who is dangerously close to instituting a communist government.

Talk about a president who knows how to stir things up without sleeping with an intern or launching a war.

If you ask me, Obama did Mitt Romney a favor when he announced his support for gay rights on ABC News, not because he handed conservatives a gotcha issue they can hammer away at in November (although I’m sure they’ll try), but rather because he took the heat off Romney.

That same week, The Washington Post did an expose revealing how Romney allegedly bullied a fellow student at the Cranbrook private boarding school outside Detroit nearly 50 years ago. The story goes that Romney rounded up a group of fellow students and chased down a classmate with long, bleached-blond hair. Romney cut off the teen’s hair with scissors while his comrades held him down. Eyewitnesses from both sides of the political aisle corroborated the incident.

After the Post report, Romney apologized for having pulled pranks in high school, but said he couldn’t recall cutting off anyone’s hair. Really? We’re not talking about a prank. We’re talking about a vicious attack that today we would call assault and battery. The victim is said to have screamed for help.