Word: fractious
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...lovemaking remains technically illegal. While a growing number of companies offer some form of benefits for same-sex "spousal equivalents," all but eight states allow employers to fire people just for being gay. Sexually active gays remain unwelcome in many mainstream Christian churches. Denominations that are more accommodating face fractious internal dissent -- as happened last week, when an Episcopal congregation in Arlington, Texas, voted to switch to Roman Catholicism, in large part over some Episcopalians' willingness to bless same-sex marriages...
Chicago politics may look just as slippery. Virginia politics is certainly more fractious. But for sheer, lip-smacking fun, there's still nothing that can beat Louisiana's. For nearly a quarter-century, Edwin W. Edwards has been much of the reason why. In four terms as Governor, Edwards, who was tried twice for fraud and racketeering but never convicted, who ran up huge gambling debts while Governor and who squired so many young women while still in his first marriage that he was dubbed "the Silver Zipper," has made Baton Rouge the undisputed capital of rascally political folklore...
...Robert Dole told the President privately that Babbitt could still be confirmed, probably by a vote of 80 to 20, the White House remained concerned about the possibility of a revolt spreading among Senate Democrats from Western states. The battle over land-use fees last year had grown so fractious that at one point a Senate Democrat told the White House it could never count on his vote again. Asked why, the Senator replied, "I'll give you three reasons: Babbitt, Babbitt and Babbitt...
Today's Congress is so fractious that little gets done without strong leadership. Time and again, Clinton has confronted large private interest groups when he could have stepped aside and let Congress temporize the issues into oblivion...
...would have to be afflicted with multiple sensory deficits to miss his point. Urban America is in physical decline. Cities as seats of education and social stability have decayed. Relations among ethnic and racial groups may have been raw in the poor immigrant neighborhoods of Bellow's youth, but fractious communities still shared a common identity as Americans. No longer. "The slums, as a friend of mine once observed, were ruined," he writes with bitter humor...