SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. (AP) — Hewlett-Packard had the right to fire an employee who posted anti-gay messages at his cubicle to protest the company’s diversity policy, a federal appeals court ruled.

HP had fired Richard Peterson, who worked in the company’s support division in Boise, Idaho, after he displayed passages from the Bible about making gay sex punishable by death.

Peterson, who worked at HP for more than two decades, said he was singled out. He said other employees were allowed to display religious symbols and pro-diversity posters.

But the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said that Peterson was not a victim of religious discrimination. The Palo Alto-based company had the right to enforce an evenhanded policy against harassment and discrimination, the court said.

Peterson was fired “because he violated the company’s harassment policy by attempting to generate a hostile and intolerant work environment” and disobeyed managers’ orders to remove the postings, Circuit Judge Stephen Reinhardt said.

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Kansas Legislators are likely to debate gay marriages this session. They probably couldn’t have avoided the topic for too many more years.

True, state law is unambiguous, declaring that only a marriage between a single man and a single woman is valid. Also, no lawmaker or group has submitted a bill or announced a push for recognizing such unions or gay marriages.

Yet House Speaker Doug Mays predicted legislators will consider an amendment to the Kansas Constitution to reaffirm the traditional definition of marriage.

A ruling in November by Massachusetts’ highest court, striking down that state’s ban on same-sex marriages, is one reason. But even before that decision, forces were in play to force a debate.

“I am certain there is a constitutional amendment coming forth,” Mays (R-Topeka) said during an interview. “I expect that effort to be successful.”

In 1996, legislators enacted what supporters called a “marriage protection act.” Not only was marriage defined as a union between parties of the opposite sex, but the law also said all other marriages were declared void. The law was a delayed response to a 1993 Hawaii Supreme Court decision striking down that state’s ban on same-sex marriages. In 1998, voters in Hawaii approved an amendment to their state’s constitution allowing legislators to “reserve marriage to opposite-sex couples.”

Meanwhile, the National Gay and Lesbian Rights Task Force in New York City worries that social conservatives are trying to lock their values into constitutions as a hedge against growing acceptance of same-sex relationships and marriages.

“They have a closing window of opportunity to keep that from happening,” said Matt Foreman, the task force’s executive director.

For all of those reasons, Kansas legislators appeared destined to debate gay marriages and civil unions for same-sex couples in the near future, even before the Massachusetts ruling put the issue on the 2004 session’s agenda for some of them.

LEXINGTON, Ky. (AP) — Michael Meehan and Thomas Dysarz, the Lexington gay men who parent quadruplets born in July 2002, have added another child to their family, according to a manager at one of the Lexington salons the men own.

The boy was born in Lexington, salon manager Anthony Lewis said. Brooke Verity of Nicholasville is the baby’s surrogate mother, as she also was for the quadruplets.

The quadruplets are the biological children of Meehan, while the new baby is Dysarz’s biological child.

The men used Verity as a surrogate for both pregnancies because they wanted the children to be related. Both pregnancies were the result of in vitro fertilization.

Meehan and Dysarz originally planned to have two children — one fathered by Meehan, the other by Dysarz. In 2001, doctors implanted four fertilized eggs into Verity, hoping one would take. Instead, all four did, resulting in the births of three boys and one girl.

Four fertilized eggs were implanted for the latest pregnancy as well, Dysarz said in May, but only one took.

BOSTON, Mass. (AP) — The passage of a federal law that bans some late-term abortions is just one of many reasons the anti-abortion movement is making progress toward its goal of overturning the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Roe v. Wade decision, activists said.

Even in Massachusetts, known as a liberal state, a “Right to Know” law that would make it mandatory for the state Public Health Department to provide women considering an abortion information about the procedure is making its way through the Statehouse, said House Speaker Thomas M. Finneran, the rally’s keynote speaker.

The legislation would require the state Public Health Department to provide women seeking an abortion “unbiased and medically accurate” information, said state Rep. Elizabeth Poirier (R-North Attleboro).

“This legislation is crucial in the right to life movement,” she said. “The support among legislators is growing and a majority is in sight.”

New ultrasound technology that gives a more detailed look into the womb, the positive public reaction to the birth of a baby whose mother had been buried under rubble in the Bam, Iran earthquake, and the “missionary spirit” of those involved in the anti-abortion movement are the other reasons to be optimistic about the movement, Finneran said.

Although the goal of Massachusetts Citizens for Life is to overturn Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision that established a woman’s right to abortion, the assembly is about more, said Peg Whitbread, the group’s president.

Some speakers also tied the abortion issue to the state’s gay marriage issue, saying both are signs of a breakdown in the traditional American family.

Finneran, while not mentioning gay marriage specifically, talked about “judicial tyranny,” or the tendency of unelected judges to make decisions affecting the people. “It is that unelected branch that is far more dangerous than anything your elected representative should and would do,” he said.

BOSTON, Mass. (AP) — Archbishop Sean P. O’Malley urged Catholic lawyers and judges on Sunday to oppose gay marriage, saying marriage and the family are “threatened as never before” in America.

O’Malley delivered the call for action at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in his homily for the annual Red Mass, which is dedicated to judges, lawyers and others in the legal system. After the Mass, former Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork called the state Supreme Judicial Court’s ruling on gay marriage “judicial tyranny.”

Gay marriage has become a hot political issue in Massachusetts since the Supreme Judicial Court ruled in mid-November that denying marriage rights to gays and lesbians was unconstitutional.

Gay and lesbian rights activists and their supports applauded the ruling as a civil rights milestone. Plaintiffs in the suit were ecstatic, celebrating with immediate proposals of marriage to each other.

The ruling has also had critics, including the Catholic Church. Some state lawmakers, who have until May to come up with legislation that complies with the SJC ruling, have been looking into whether the court would be satisfied by the passage of a “civil union” law like that passed in Vermont.

Hillary Goodridge, a lead plaintiff with her partner Julie Goodridge in the lawsuit that resulted in the SJC ruling, said by phone afterward that she was baffled by O’Malley’s words.

The issue at the core of the lawsuit was not morality, she said, but “licenses handed out by the government.”

“It’s impossible for me to understand how Julie and I being married contributes to the breakdown of anything. It contributes to our economic and social well-being, it certainly contributes to the strength of our family and our enduring love for each other,” she said.

O’Malley was installed July 30 as the head of the Boston Archdiocese, which has an estimated 2.1 million parishioners.

His first priority was to settle hundreds of clergy sex abuse lawsuits filed by people who accused priests of molesting them and the archdiocese of covering up the scandal. In September, the church reached an $85 million agreement to settle the cases.

Within weeks after the settlement, O’Malley began speaking out on social issues, leading an anti-abortion march and speaking out against gay marriage.

TRENTON, N.J. (AP) — Legislation that would grant new financial benefits and legal rights for same-sex couples is already having an effect, even before the measure has become law.

Gay rights advocates predict more gay couples will move to New Jersey, which stands to become the fifth state in the nation to provide legal recognition of same-sex partnerships.

“You’re going to see a real influx of gay Philadelphia into South Jersey,” Steven Goldstein, a Brooklyn, N.Y., resident who help lead lobbying efforts for the legislation, told The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Gov. James E. McGreevey is expected to sign the legislation, and it would become law 180 days afterward, allowing the state time to prepare for the changes.

Under the measure, domestic partners would gain access to medical benefits, insurance and other legal rights. New Jersey would also recognize such partnerships granted in other states. The bill does not authorize gay marriage, which is against the law in New Jersey.

To obtain domestic-partner status, a couple would have to share a residence and show proof of joint financial status or property ownership or designation of the partner as the beneficiary in a retirement plan or will.

The bill would not force businesses to offer health coverage to same-sex partners of employees but would require insurance companies to make it available. It would also allow a surviving partner to gain property rights and other survivors’ benefits.

A divorce-like proceeding in Superior Court would be necessary to end a domestic partnership.

The measure also includes some benefits for domestic unions between unmarried heterosexual couples age 62 and over.