Thirty-six years ago today, a young woman in a high-collared white dress with transparent bell sleeves and a man with what seems like an impossibly wide and even afro said their I-dos in a Catholic Church in Washington, D.C. Those people were my parents. Their wedding style (you guys should see the bridesmaid dresses!!!!) hasn't exactly stood the test of time, but that doesn't really matter. Their love has. Happy Anniversary, guys!

Wherein you, the readers, talk amongst yourselves.

The social barriers that many of our parents dealt with when they were in the dating world have been (more or less) lifted, but I can't count how many times a friend or acquaintance has told me that their parents or grandparents would die if they knew they were dating someone of a different race, religion, and/or ethnicity. Do your parents have open minds when it comes to your relationships or has it been a learning process? Are there people you just "can never bring home?"

Father's Day has come and gone, but, as Barack Obama so eloquently said during his Father's Day speech yesterday, being a Father is a full-time gig. So in honor of yesterday's holiday, Stereohyped is presenting its first annual Father's Day Awards. Obviously, there is no way for any of us to know everything about someone's fathering skills or lack thereof based on what we see in the media, so take this with a grain of salt, people. All in all, if you are there for your kids and do you best and don't do anything to screw them up psychologically for life, you're doing a pretty good job. But I think that must not always be as easy as it sounds…

CONTINUED »

Most of what we hear in the news about black dads is that they're absent ne'er do wells who leave all the rearing to black women and fail to pay child support. All of us who do have great dads, myself included (Hi, Daddy!), know this is not the case. Below, check out some celebrity dads in honor of Father's Day this Sunday.

As if it's not embarrassing enough for Terrence Howard's daughter that her dad, in this day and age, threatened to kill her boyfriend and compared her to an unripened fruit, he's telling the press about it. Somehow, someday, a publicist is going to need to tell him how weird he sounds in interviews. Handle that, publicists!

"She’s supposedly in love with some guy. I made her break up with him, and I’ve threatened to kill him. I was like, you picked a green fruit from the tree that’s far from ripe… [I told her],I’ve set a lot of things aside for you, but those things are only yours as long as you’re obedient to me.. She’s OK now. Though, I’m sure he’s still kind of her boyfriend. This summer I’ll take her off to another country where her phone won’t work, and he’ll start dating someone else."

Wherein you, the readers, talk amongst yourselves.

It's come up a bit in the comments. How important do you think it is for parents to be married when they have children? How important is marriage in the black community?

RACE AND MATERNAL RESPECT This is why we watch My Super Sweet 16 with our mouths hanging open in shock: "Young African-American and Latina girls treat their mothers with greater deference than do whites but their mothers take it harder when tempers flare, according to a new University of Florida study. 'Within African-American and Latino families, children follow a cultural tradition that places a high value on respecting, obeying and learning from elders, and in our study they did indeed show more respect for parental authority,' said Julia Graber, a UF psychology professor."

Not to be outdone by CNN and its new documentary series about being black in America, MSNBC is airing a documentary Friday called Meeting David Wilson. It's about a young black man named David Wilson who, in the course of researching his family's history, finds the descendant of the white family that owned his ancestors. The man's name is also David Wilson.

The documentary airs Friday at 9pm, and it will be followed by a 90-minute "conversation" about race moderated by Brian Williams.

• LL Cool J calls on young people to seek out father figures. How about calling on fathers to actually stay in their kids' lives? [CM]

• Snoop Dogg's going to remix the One Life to Live song and make a cameo appearance on the soap opera. Yes. [EUR]

• Ever heard of a Bro Mitzvah? [JJ]

• Marylanders are pissed over an anti-immigration poster that depicts a (non-Hispanic) state legislator sporting a sombrero. [Ex]

• Hip hop invades Iran, much to the delight of the authorities there. [USNWR]

When I started saw this story in the New York Times about a Staten Island gang member of Liberian descent whose mother sent him to war-torn Liberia for four years (deep) to straighten him out, I was expecting to read an encouraging tale (minus the part when the story's subject recounts witnessing the public disembowelment of a pregnant woman) about how a young man used the lesson's learned on the streets of Staten Island and during his impossibly difficult years in Africa to improve his life. The ending was a lot less hope-filled than that. Even without an ending that ties things together in a pretty bow, the story is worth a read. [NYT]

Dog the Bounty Hunter needs to look no further than his own family to find out who dogged (get it?!?) him out by slipping the National Enquirer a career-damaging tape filled with racial slurs. That's right, it was his nigger-loving son. What can I say? Once you go black, you never go back. But the money was probably good, too. [AP]

• The FDA just approved a new HIV drug that attacks the virus in a different way — great news for patients who have developed a resistance to current HIV drugs.

• Calling Supreme Court justices — women are just as likely to get abortions when it's illegal as they are when it's not.

• Breast cancer treatment differs between black and white women. No way!

• Prostate cancer is more likely to return in blacks than in whites.

• First borns have higher IQs? As a last born, i recent the implications.

When I hear the term "Family Values," I think of the Christian Right and Rev. Jerry Falwell, and I get all squirmy and want to run in the opposite direction. But Tyler Perry (seen here at yesterday's Why Did I Get Married? premiere) recently announced that he wants to launch his own network geared toward promoting family values. Thankfully, that probably doesn't include gay bashing and anti-abortion speeches. Plus, rumor has it T.P. is the last guy with any business spouting anti-gay invectives. If you catch my drift.

Perry says, "Our children and our families are falling apart because there's only one thing to see, there's only one place you can go for information, especially African-American people, and a lot of times it's very negative.

"There are a lot of horrible things going on when you turn on the television with sex and violence and everybody has become desensitized to it. I want to own a television cable network that will be all positive when you turn it on in the morning, it will inspire your children if they're watching cartoons or the prime time."

This sounds like a good idea for kids, even if it turns into a self-indulgent Madea-fest. It will definitely be better than what the kids are watching in the mornings now.

What are the kids watching in the mornings? I'm out of touch.

CONTINUED »