LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - Newsweek editor Tina Brown is celebrated for her unabashed predilection for controversial covers to boost public interest and sales.

Newsweek released the cover early, likely hoping to drum up attention for their next issue and their same-sex marriage coverage.

Many see it as a flamboyant retort to the recent Time magazine cover of a young blonde mother breastfeeding her 3-year-old boy.

Stealing a quote from the popular motion picture "The Hunger Games," Editor Brown is said to have announced "let the games begin!"

Newsweek magazine's regular blogger, Andrew Sullivan, who is an openly gay self-titled conservative political pundit wrote the accompanying article. 

"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," 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," Sullivan writes.

President Obama made his announcement of his support for gay marriage in a taped interview with Good Morning America's Robin Roberts last week.

Historic: President Obama made his announcement in a taped interview with Good Morning America's Robin Roberts on Wednesday

There was little doubt that Newsweek would be covering the President's historic announcement that he supports same-sex marriage after he had a sit-down television interview confirming what many already believed to be the case.

Newsweek points out that this is 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 craftily 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.

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."

Republicans, the majority of whom are against gay marriage, say Obama simply made his historic announcement in an effort to gain support among liberal voters in the lead up to the general election.

"While President Obama has played politics on this issue, the Republican Party and our presumptive nominee Mitt Romney has been clear," Republican national committee chairman Reince Priebus said in a statement.

"We support maintaining marriage between one man and one woman and would oppose any attempts to change that."

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