Word: partly
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Baltimore, the church's continuing opposition to gay marriage will be part of a discussion by the bishops as they finish a formal letter on "married love" and reproduction, a document that will also spell out its position against abortion and in vitro fertilization. A draft of the document makes the case that marriage has been under assault for decades by secularists, feminists and others who see it as a social construction easily morphed into new shapes or ignored altogether. Archbishop Joseph Kurtz, who leads the U.S. church's efforts to prevent the legalization of same-sex marriage, was encouraged...
Kurtz's archdiocese is the state's largest and most influential in Kentucky, itself a bulwark in the opposition to gay marriage. In 2004, voters in the state overwhelmingly passed a constitutional amendment forbidding gay marriage, despite the fact that it was already illegal. In part because of that vote and subsequent ones like it, Kurtz and his fellow bishops will find considerable wind in their sails when they gather next week to discuss the new pastoral letter and hear Kurtz on the bishops' efforts to defend traditional marriage through education and through active engagement in the political process...
...West Bank and East Jerusalem - and the Palestinians' refusal to enter talks without one - has left the Obama Administration's plans in tatters, with Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas threatening to resign and pull the plug on the PA and the peace process of which it forms a part...
...vote had been delayed for weeks over the apparently parochial issue of electoral lists for the contested northern city of Kirkuk. Oil-rich Kirkuk, claimed by Iraq's Kurds as an integral part of their autonomous semistate but administered by the Arab-dominated government in Baghdad, has long been a potential flash point in the uneasy relationship between the Kurdish autonomous region and Baghdad. Sunday's compromise, which allows recent Kurdish returnees (much of the city's Kurdish population had been expelled by Saddam Hussein, precisely to cement Arab control there) to vote in Kirkuk but gives parliament the authority...
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki pledged to abide by the Iraqi constitution and "normalize" Kirkuk by removing the tens of thousands of Arab Iraqis settled there by Saddam as part of an ethnic-cleansing campaign in the 1980s. After such normalization, according to the constitution, Kirkuk - and other areas with large Kurdish populations in four Iraqi governorates - should then hold a referendum to determine whether they should continue to be administered by Baghdad or be ruled by the Kurdistan Regional Government. It may have been constitutionally mandated, but the idea of forcibly resettling Kirkuk's Arab population was unthinkable...