Great news out of California this week! Proposition 8, the voter-approved ban on same sex marriage in California, was ruled unconstitutional by a federal appeals court on Tuesday.

Prop 8 has been very controversial since 2008, when it was narrowly passed by a vote of 52 percent to 48 percent. You probably remember the Yes on Prop 8/No on Prop 8 campaigns. Even though the law only affected California, people from around the country got involved with the issue. And even though countless celebrities and big companies like Google threw their weight behind the No on Prop 8 campaign, it still managed to pass.

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Cities across England turned dangerous as violent riots, spurred by the death of a black man by police, spread throughout the country. Mobs took over the streets, setting buildings and cars on fire, shattering windows, and looting stores. Things were particularly bad in London, where the Prime Minister sent 16,000 policemen on Tuesday to calm things down. It worked- the worst is over- but the cost of clean up is estimated to be in the tens of millions. Even though the riots began because of one man’s death, the social and economic inequality may have been what really heated things up. That’s an issue pretty familiar to those living in the U.S., and now, many are wondering, could the same thing happen in the states? Read More »

The Village was alaze with celebration and excitement Sunday as the 42nd Annual Gay Pride Parade took to the streets of mid and lower Manhattan.  The parade comes only two days after the New York Senate voted to legalize same-sex marriages in the State of New York.  NYC Gov. Andrew Cuomo was the obvious hero of the day, leaving the McCords from Real Housewives NYC as the obvious zeros.  Alex and hubby hugged the outer edge of the route in extreme effort to assure camera’s like ours caught it.

Caught it we did, in addition to 100 or so more pics.  So check out these 135 photos from Sunday’s historic Pride Parade.  And give cheers around to NY for having the cajones to recognizing equal rights for all.

(all photos © CollegeCandy.com 2011)

Real Housewives New York’s Alex McCord

The Man of the Hour Governor Andrew Cuomo

initiating the gallery...

News broke that Arnold Schwarzenegger fathered a child with a family housekeeper almost fifteen years ago. The famous movie actor, body builder and former Governor of California has a history of not-so-savory sexual drama. When he was running for office back in 2003, a number of women came forward claiming he had sexually harassed them. His now-separated wife, Maria Shriver, stood by her man back then, but news that he impregnated their employee at the same time she herself was pregnant must have been too much. Can’t say I blame her.

LinkedIn went from being a privately owned company to a publicly owned one that anyone can invest in. The switch happened Thursday with a bang- it was the biggest company opening on the market in two years. Demand for the stock was so high that less than 5% of people who wanted to buy shares could. The stocks even reached a price three times what had been predicted. (Read more on this.) Read More »

Still in disbelief that Justin Bieber has a biographical movie out

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Rihanna’s new single is banned in 11 countries. Wow.

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With a kid this cute, there is going to be a fight!

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Yesterday, two years after Prop 8 – a proposition to ban gay marriage in California – was passed, Federal Judge Vaugh Walker released a 136-page document deeming the proposition unconstitutional. To say it was a big day for the gay and lesbian community in this country is an understatement. In fact, to say it was a big day for this very straight woman is an understatement, too.

Having been raised in a liberal household before attending an extremely liberal college, I literally cannot understand the idea of banning gay marriage. Say what you will about the whole “marriage is between a man and a woman” thing, making it illegal for a gay couple to get married is unfair, unjust and in opposition to the morals and ideals this country was built on. Read More »

And this is why tattoos should be illegal.

(Sorta) big news for gay marriage!

Is Vienna Girardi a (really good) liar?

7 ways to sneak in more water during the day.

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Reality TV stars are diseased.

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Gary Coleman’s ex is one messed up woman.

Whoa, David Beckham has gotten better with age.

Cute outfits for summer dates.

Turns out gay couples are better at relationships than the rest of us.

As a generation of Facebookers, Twitterers, bloggers, BBMers, iPhone-ers, GPS users, and so on and so on, we are often viewed by the older I-went-to-the-library-to-do-research generation as lazy and dependent.  We have the world at our fingertips and we don’t have to use our brains for virtually anything, or so they claim.

Yes, we can access Google at any moment, and no we do not need White Out to correct our papers, but to the contrary, it is our 24/7 connection that makes us anything but lazy when it comes to fighting for what we believe in.

Take for example, the heated debate of gay marriage.  While an older generation calls the shots in Congress, in most states, it is still illegal.  According to a study by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, 65 percent of college freshman surveyed were in favor of gay marriage.  The findings revealed that even a large majority of students classified as far-right were also supporters. Read More »

[It's pretty obvious that the average CollegeCandy reader has some very strong opinions. Opinions that she likes to share with everyone on the site. We love a strong woman (unless she happens to be charging at us with her fists raised), so we thought we'd give her a real forum to discuss her thoughts, feelings, and perspectives. Every Friday I'll be featuring a hot topic (like plastic surgery!) and leaving it up to you, the readers, to duke it out. So, read it and get your debate on in the comments section below!]

OK, I can already feel this one’s gonna get messy, so hold on tight folks.

I admit, I’ve put off talking about gay marriage here for a while, in part because, well, I went to a liberal arts school in NYC – I have way too many gay friends to really be impartial here. Then last week, the assistant managing editor of the Notre Dame student newspaper resigned during the controversy over an anti-gay joke that appeared in the paper’s comic strip and I realized that this is an issue that still affects us all, and we need to talk about it.

Now I’m not going to get into a moral argument here – I doubt that I could change anyone’s opinions one way or another about that particular issue; my questions instead are logistical – is gay marriage inevitably going to become legal and if so, what’s the point of fighting it?

Right now, five states allow gay marriage and several other have passed bills allowing it only to have them repealed. Regardless of your moral standpoint, the legal (and yes, marriage is considered a legal institution, not a religious one in the US) arguments for gay marriage are persuasive. Now, admittedly, there’s a lot of strange and old-fashioned laws still on the books that just hang around (did you know that it’s illegal to let a donkey sleep in a bathtub in Arizona?), but that’s mostly because people forget about them. Same-sex marriage is one issue that people are fighting for and are probably going to continue to fight for, so why not just let it go? Read More »