Word: reformer
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There is hardly a religious group in America that is not beset by the issue that rent the Methodist meeting in May: the place of gay people in its pews. In March the organization of Reform Jewish rabbis agreed that its members could perform gay-holy-union ceremonies if they chose. The group was then castigated for it by other Jewish branches. Last month the Vatican, which had earlier ordered an American nun and priest to end a ministry to gays and their families because it did not stress the "intrinsically disordered" nature of homosexuality, further prohibited...
...most wrenching expression of the dilemma is playing out in the mainline, a process that will intensify this week as the Presbyterian Church (USA) convenes in Long Beach, Calif. Few expect the Southern Baptists to ordain gays or the Reform Jews to legislate against them, but the traditional liberal denominations are almost violently torn. The three proposals whose passage prompted the civil disobedience and arrests in Cleveland--bans on gay ministers and holy unions, as well as a clause stating that homosexuality is "incompatible with Christian teaching"--prevailed by votes of roughly 2 to 1. That kind of majority...
Kerrey and Gore would have to compose earlier differences - on Social Security reform, for example, and on that ugly business about some of Gore's people in New Hampshire supposedly kicking mud on Kerrey and calling him "a cripple." But in politics, antipathies may be temporary. Once in 1990 I sat in Senator Al Gore's office in Washington and asked him what he thought of Bill Clinton of Arkansas. Gore sneered: "Clinton hasn't got a clue." Kerrey, a lighter, funnier, and infinitely more authentic man than Gore - and a war hero, winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor...
...kneed to carry out. Ranchers such as Roger Barnett from Douglas, who boasts of capturing illegals on his property--his record is 170 in a day--have become the heroes of anti-immigration activists around the country. Such groups as the American Patrol and the California Coalition for Immigration Reform often liken the ranchers in their literature to the Minutemen of the American Revolution...
...ZANU-PF did best in the countryside, where it?s demagoguery over land-reform struck a deep chord among section of the rural poor. But the party was roundly trounced in the urban areas (and even many rural constituencies) where voters viewed the government's sudden interest in "redistributing" white farms as a cynical attempt at exploiting rural misery to deflect attention from its own legacy of corruption, catastrophic economic mismanagement, military misadventures and violent suppression of dissent...