In a gutsy move, Newsweek has released the cover of their next issue, on the cover of which they depict President Obama with a rainbow halo and the title of 'The First Gay President'.

Tina Brown, who edits the magazine and its sister website The Daily Beast, is known for her love of controversial covers to help boost public interest and sales.

After Time magazine went with a cover shot of a young blonde mother breastfeeding her 3-year-old boy, Ms Brown is said to have taken it in stride, saying 'let the games begin!'

The article accompanying the cover was written by the news magazine's regular blogger, Andrew Sullivan, who is an openly gay self-titled conservative political pundit.

'When you step back a little and assess the record of Obama on gay rights, you see, in fact, that this was not an aberration. It was an inevitable culmination of three years of work,' Mr Sullivan said in a statement about the article.

'He had to discover his black identity and then reconcile it with his white family, just as gays discover their homosexual identity and then have to reconcile it with their heterosexual family,' he wrote, describing the similarities between Mr Obama and the gay community.

This was, however, the first time that a sitting President had done so, and the magazine asserts that such a move was a calculated one that had been thoroughly planned.

'It’s easy to write off President Obama’s announcement of his support for gay marriage as a political ploy during an election year. But don’t believe the cynics,' representatives from the news magazine told Politico in a statement about the article.

President Obama's announcement came several days after Vice President Joe Biden said that he was 'absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women and men and women marrying are entitled to the same exact rights, all the civil rights, all the civil liberties.'

The move, thought to be a misstep as he made his opinion known before Mr Obama publicly declared his, was criticized by many within the administration and outside of the White House.

Mr Romney re-affirmed his opposition to gay marriage in a speech to graduates of evangelical Liberty University in Virginia last week. He described marriage as an 'enduring institution' and said that it should be 'a relationship between one man and one woman'.

(Read by Emily Cheng. Emily Cheng is a journalist at the China Daily Website.)

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(Agencies)