Do tell… Polls Show That Blacks Are More In Favor Of Gay Marriage According to Christian Post Recent polls show increasing support for same-sex marriage among blacks. A national exit poll by Edison Research shows that black voters favored their state legalizing gay marriage, 51 to 41 percent. Pew polls have also showed an increase from 36 percent in 2011 to 44 percent last month supporting gay marriage. According to the exit poll conducted by Edison Research on behalf of the NEP, 51 percent of black voters said their states should legally recognize same-sex marriage, compared with 47 percent of whites who favored this idea. It’s a big shift considering that in 2011, the Pew Research Center found that only 36 percent of blacks favored legalizing gay marriage, compared with 49 percent of whites supporting it. A Pew survey found last month that long-standing racial differences in attitudes toward gay marriage were narrowing. Consistently over the past decade, blacks have been far less supportive of legalizing gay marriage than whites. But the latest survey found blacks divided more evenly on this issue than in the past, with 44 percent in favor and 39 percent opposed to allowing gay marriage. Among whites, 49 percent favored and 41 percent opposed same-sex marriage. Says the NAACP: The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the nation’s oldest African-American civil rights group, voted in May to support a resolution endorsing same-sex marriage at its board meeting in Miami, Fla. “The mission of the NAACP has always been to ensure political, social and economic equality of all people,” Roslyn M. Brock, chairman of the Board of Directors of the NAACP, said in a statement. “We have and will oppose efforts to codify discrimination into law.” Benjamin Todd Jealous, president and CEO of the NAACP, said in a statement, “Civil marriage is a civil right and a matter of civil law. The NAACP’s support for marriage equality is deeply rooted in the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution and equal protection of all people. The well-funded right wing organizations who are attempting to split our communities are no friend to civil rights, and they will not succeed.” Pow! Sounds like the Association is down to make sure that Michael and Matthew can get married and divorced like everyone else in the country. Do YOU support gay marriage? Why or why not? Image via YouTube
Introspective masculinity, women on top, cross-dressing PSAs , gay undertones — the James Bond franchise has come a long way in 50 years, most notably during the current era built around Daniel Craig ’s serious Blond Bond with the icy blue eyes. Behind the scenes, producers Barbara Broccoli and her half-brother Michael G. Wilson set the record straight on recent Idris Elba-as-Bond rumors and pointed to the post-9/11 shift that spurred them to take Bond from the slick reign of Pierce Brosnan to the morally-complex brand of progressive contemporary heroism embodied in this week’s Skyfall . “I think once we made the decision to go with Casino Royal e – we had the rights, and we decided to make the change after Die Another Day – it had a lot to do with 9/11 and the way the world was at that time,” Broccoli told Movieline recently in Los Angeles. “A post-9/11 world. It was a real opportunity to recalibrate.” Craig’s Bond re-set the franchise on a grittier path starting with Casino Royale , which exposed 007’s only vulnerability — his heart — and its continuation Quantum of Solace , which healed his emotional wounds with violent redemption. Skyfall , however, finds Bond unencumbered by romance; feeling his loneliness and approaching obsolescence. His new enemy is mortality itself — and Silva, the off-kilter, tech-savvy nemesis bent on revenge against former boss M (Judi Dench) played with calculated control by Javier Bardem. “They are mirror images of one another,” explained Wilson, who has produced every Bond film since 1979’s Moonraker . “They come from the same background, and in a way M has sacrificed them at one point or another for what she considered to be a greater good. But one becomes obsessed by this and it drives him. The other one goes through a funk but gets over it and comes back to defend her and the country. It’s an interesting thing about how people cope with the negative things that happen in their lives.” PHOTO GALLERY: 007 MINGLES WITH ROYALTY AT THE SKYFALL PREMIERE In a franchise known as much for its suave but patriotic spy hero as its insanely evil and flamboyant villains, Skyfall dares to contradict both tropes. Bond, for the first time, questions whether queen and country value his service, his sacrifices, and his very life, while Silva, it’s revealed, actually has a pretty good reason to seek vengeance. Skyfall asks a question relevant to today’s global military interests: Who is to blame when the few are sacrificed for the good of the many? “We wanted to create a complex story, and the whole point is that things aren’t black and white anymore,” said Broccoli. “As M says, they have to operate in the shadows. You don’t know who the enemies are. You have to fight on a very different playing field than when there was a more specific world order. Ultimately it comes down to individuals and the spirit of self-sacrifice for the greater good, and that’s what Bond is about. It’s about heroism.” That heroism isn’t exclusively reserved for James Bond, either. Broccoli and Wilson see the role of women in Skyfall as part of a larger legacy of 007 heroines in various forms — mostly shapely ones, embodied in five decades of Bond girls — that stems from writer Ian Fleming’s own wartime experiences. “You have to understand that in his experience during the war, women were very active and part of the resistance, part of the war effort,” said Broccoli. “So he saw women as being very heroic and courageous. And I think when you look at the early films, that’s very evident in the characters — they’re all very strong characters. Some of them have had some hardship, but they all go about their missions with a real determination. Many times they sacrifice themselves for Bond, and I think that’s something that definitely came out of his experience in the war.” PHOTO GALLERY: MEET BERENICE MARLOHE, SKYFALL ‘S NEW BOND GIRL Bond’s women, of course, weren’t always written with strengths to complement their overt sexualization. “I think that there was a period in time in the films when the women became more window-dressing,” she admitted. “But certainly in the last five or six films there’s been a real effort to make them as complex and interesting and heroic, or as bad and evil as the villain. And casting Judi Dench as M, making her the authority figure, has given that relationship between Bond and M a lot more complexity. But I think the films have evolved the same way society has evolved. I hope that they’ll continue to evolve.” Could there conceivably be a female Bond one day? “Everything is possible,” teased Wilson. That said, Bond is a man, and will probably stay that way. Broccoli, who produced the Equals campaign PSA, which featured Craig as 007 dressed in drag , cautioned against getting too carried away with the possibilities. “It isn’t about interchanging men and women, it’s about giving people an equal kind of opportunity,” she said. “So there’s certainly the possibility of having a female heroic figure that is like Bond, but just to interchange them — I don’t know what the point would be.” As for the notorious Skyfall scene in which Bond and Silva share a flirtatious exchange , Wilson and Broccoli are amused by fan speculation about 007’s newly fluid sexuality. “I think they’re trying to psych each other out,” Wilson said of the scene. A game of chicken, so to speak, I asked? “Yes!” he replied. So maybe the producers aren’t quite ready for an openly bisexual Bond, or a lady Bond. They’re also not jumping to replace Craig in that bespoke Tom Ford suit either, despite a report that Idris Elba was being courted to become the first black 007. Broccoli set the record straight. “I love Idris and I met him on something else,” she explained. “We are very happy with Daniel Craig [laughs] and I always say I can only be in love with one person at a time.” “Daniel Craig is James Bond,” she continued. “It’s not even… we can’t even think about it. It’s like going down the aisle to get married and looking for your next husband. It doesn’t work that way. But [Elba] is a phenomenal actor. With Craig signed on for at least two more Bond films, we likely won’t see a new Bond come into the picture for a few more years. But could the future of Bond ostensibly be color-blind? “Oh, absolutely,” said Broccoli. “Why not?” Read more on Skyfall and celebrate Bond’s 50th Anniversary with all things 007 . Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Director Sam Mendes and screenwriters, Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and John Logan have done a very wily thing for James Bond’s 50th anniversary: They’ve given 007 a midlife crisis. The trauma takes root during the white-knuckle opening of Skyfall , the best film so far of Daniel Craig ‘s run as Ian Fleming’s suave super spy and one of the best of the Bond franchise. After chasing his quarry by motorcycle over the rooftops of Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar and piloting an earth mover over a speeding train to keep his target from escaping, a wounded Bond loses the battle, and, it appears, his life. But since the movie has only just started, there’s not much doubt that he will back after the eerie-but-dreamy titles sequence set to Adele’s lush theme song . ‘ When he appears on screen again, Bond’s in paradise and presumed dead in the U.K. His wounds have healed, except for the big psychic gash that has him drinking shots while balancing a riled scorpion on his wrist for sport. Alas, even paradise has CNN and, soon, Bond is learning from Wolf Blitzer that MI6’s headquarters have been bombed and it’s time for him to return to the service of his country. Except it’s not as easy as that. After Mike Myers strip-mined the Bond franchise for his Austin Powers parodies, the Bond writers take a cue from The Spy Who Shagged Me and explore the idea: what would happen if James Bond lost his mojo? Although Craig’s chiseled body does not exactly cooperate with the plotline, he does the best acting of his career playing a supremely confident man grappling with the onset of doubt: doubt in himself, doubt in his work and doubt in his superiors, who with the exception of M (played once again with stately grit by Judi Dench), seem to be of the mind that 007 has passed his sell by date. But, shaky as his trigger hand may be, 007 is not going down without a fight. There’s a wonderful scene in the National Gallery in London where Bond meets the new Q, who turns out to be an insouciant young whippersnapper played by the excellent Ben Whishaw. As man and boy genius stare at J.M.W. Turner’s painting The Fighting Téméraire’ tugged to her last Berth to be broken up, Q sets the tone by describing the image as a “grand old warship being ignominiously hauled away to scrap.” He then boasts that he can accomplish more while working his laptop at home “in my pajamas.” Guys like Bond, he implies, are only still around because “Every now and then a trigger has to be pulled.” “Or not pulled,” 007 replies before going in for the kill. “It’s hard to know when you’re in your pajamas.” Craig’s searing, stoic performance is beautifully complemented by Javier Bardem’s flamboyant turn as Silva, a former MI6 operative and computer genius who has stolen the list of every NATO agent embedded in enemy camps across the globe and is slowly blowing their covers. Bardem vaults into the pantheon of Bond villains by playing Silva as a bleach-blonde, computer savvy Anton Chigurh, who appears to have a thing for Bond. Even more remarkable, when Silva reveals this attraction to his bound former colleague by caressing his chest, 007 coolly alludes that it wouldn’t be the first time he’s gotten it on with a guy. Silva has a different kind of hard-on for M, who turns out to be the reason he has hatched his evil plan, which, like the rest of the movie, is more plausible and human-scale than a lot of the world-domination hoo-ha that has taken place in previous Bond films. “Think on your sins,” is the warning message that Silva repeatedly sends M, and when he eventually recounts the blood-curdling turn of events that led him to turn his back on his country, it’s difficult not to have some empathy for him. Skyfall has most of the familiar ingredients of Bond film — beautiful women, sleek cars — the Aston Martin DB5 makes a cameo appearance that will be talked about for a long time — memorable villains and intense action scenes. And yet, the movie is also full of surprises, small and pivotal. You won’t find me spilling any of them though. Not unless martinis are involved. Follow Frank DiGiacomo on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
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