Anyone care to help with br tags?

i’m in the process of creating a theme from scratch for my personal site at http://5thirtyone.com/ and am in a little bit of a rut.

i have the base template up and running. nothing but active posts. everything else (comments, category links, etc.) will be added later.

i noticed that my tags are not displaying correctly after i save posts.

if anyone has some time i’d appreciate it if someone could point out my mistake.

edit: after looking at the code it looks like the br tags are being removed and replaced with p tags. any insight?