Rudy Giuliani opposes gay marriage because he “believes marriage is between a man and a woman,” as his campaign Web site states. But he supports domestic partnerships, which he believes recognize “equal rights under law for all Americans.”
The next question then arises, as Marc Ambinder has put it: “What rights should straight people have that gay people shouldn’t?”
This is political dynamite, and even as Rudy declines to specify, the way he has framed the distinction implies an answer. If, as he says, he supports “equal rights,” then the only difference between “marriage” and “partnership” is semantic—a kind of “separate but equal” doctrine. Anything beyond semantics, however, logically necessitates unequal rights.
In other words, either you support equality or you support discrimination.
Rudy seems to recognize this dilemma; as a campaign spokeswoman told the Boston Globe, “It’s about rights and benefits more than the title.” Indeed, this was a point Rudy made in 2004 on the O’Reilly Factor: “So now you have a civil partnership, domestic partnership, civil union—whatever you want to call it—and that takes care of the imbalance, the discrimination, which we shouldn’t have.”
To be sure, people can reasonably disagree as to whether such sweeping change should arise democratically or juridically. But procedural issues aside, if the difference between “gay marriage” and “domestic partnership” is just words, then what’s the big deal anyway?
Addendum: Even Charles Krauthammer, who is rarely at a loss for perspicuity, can barely muster up an argument. “I think it is a mistake for society to make this ultimate declaration of indifference between gay and straight life, if only for reasons of pedagogy,” he writes.
“They hate you!” says Rudy Giuliani in his new role as fearmonger in chief, relentlessly reminding audiences of all the nasty people out there. “They don’t want you to be in this college!” he recently warned an audience at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta. “Or you, or you, or you,” he said, reportedly jabbing his finger at students. In the first Republican debate he warned, “We are facing an enemy that is planning all over this world, and it turns out planning inside our country, to come here and kill us.” On the campaign trail, Giuliani plays a man exasperated by the inability of Americans to see the danger staring them in the face. “This is reality, ma’am,” he told a startled woman at Oglethorpe. “You’ve got to clear your head.”
“If you compare [Rudy's] remarks to what every politician and most of our citizens were saying on September 12, 2001, you would not find it noteworthy or unusual.”
More:
In one 15-minute phone interview in August, Giuliani compared the terrorism threat with Nazism or communism six times (Time).
“If one of them gets elected, it sounds to me like we’re going on the defense,” he said. “We’ve got a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. We’re going to wave the white flag there. We’re going to try to cut back on the Patriot Act. We’re going to cut back on electronic surveillance. We’re going to cut back on interrogation. We’re going to cut back, cut back, cut back, and we’ll be back in our pre-September 11 mentality of being on defense” (Washington Post).
Rudy Giuliani is a Republican who holds the Democratic position on abortion. He’s also a Catholic, which digs his hole even deeper, since various American bishops have threatened to deny him Holy Communion, as they did to John Kerry in 2004.
Accordingly, most political strategists would advise Rudy to avoid the subject of communion at all costs, on the theory that there’s no good way out of this minefield. A satisfactory answer would require either an encyclical or a Castro-length sermon, they posit.
Sorry, but that’s dead wrong. Instead of obfuscating or tiptoeing around the issue, Rudy plunged headfirst into it, in the current issue of the New Yorker:
“They [the bishops] have every right to tell me anything they want,” Giuliani said to me. “But then I have every right to believe anything I want. And, ultimately, that sort of expresses both my political faith and my religious faith. They have a right to instruct me. And then, having my own conscience, and my own mind, and being my own individual person, I have a right to determine whether I agree with that or I don’t agree with it. Now, there are some people that look at religion differently. That’s the way I look at it. It’s a way that helps me understand morality better. It helps me understand God better. And ultimately it’s my relationship with God, my relationship with Jesus, that’s the important one. And I’ve got to figure it out. And if they help me they do. And if I don’t agree with it then I have to go with my own conscience.”
Thus, in just 152 words—to a reporter, no less—Rudy defused a tinderbox. He didn’t pander, but spoke from his heart. Joe Klein would be proud.
Rudy’s homily is especially important because it disproves the conventional wisdom that Republicans are better communicators than Democrats, the thinking being that the nuance of clause-draped liberal ideas doesn’t lend itself to sound bites (cf., “support the troops” vs. “pro-troop, anti-war”). As Stanley Fish has brilliantly elucidated, what matters is not the message but the messenger:
If you can’t explain an idea or a policy plainly in one or two sentences, it’s not yours. . . . Words are not just the cosmetic clothing of some underlying integrity; they are the operational vehicles of that integrity, the visible manifestation of the character to which others respond. And if the words you use fall apart, ring hollow, trail off and sound as if they came from nowhere or anywhere (these are the same thing), the suspicion will grow that what they lack is what you lack.
Indeed, a good communicator can always articulate his message, regardless of complexity and without compromising the integrity of his argument. Tom Friedman, a liberal columnist for the New York Times, is a master of this art, using simple metaphors, like The Lexus vs. the Olive Tree and The World Is Flat, to encapsulate big ideas.
Bear this in mind the next time someone carps that, say, Hillary Clinton’s position on Iraq is too sophisticated to be simplified. It’s not the position, it’s the person, that’s the problem.
Addendum: As soon as I finish praising Rudy Rudy for being forthright, I read that he’s clammed up. Asked last week at a town-hall meeting in Iowa if he is a “traditional, practicing Roman Catholic,” Rudy retorted, “My religious affiliation, my religious practices and the degree to which I am a good or not so good Catholic, I prefer to leave to the priests.”
Addendum (8/20/2007): The more I think about it, the less I think there’s a contradiction between the above two quotes. In short, some questions, like whether one is a good Catholic, are inappropriate, and it can be refreshing to hear a politician tell a questioner as much.
In fact, this is what Mitt Romney told a writer for the Atlantic Monthly last year, who asked if he wears Temple Garments—white underclothing, with the “Marks of the Holy Priesthood” sewn in, donned with reverence by the most faithful Mormons. “I’ll just say those sorts of things I’ll keep private,” Romney sensibly replied.
The latest YouTube video making the rounds shows Rudy Giuliani speaking at a Women’s Coalition for Giuliani event. The clip is 17 years old and only 28 seconds, but it contains a sentence that, I suspect, will haunt Rudy’s campaign: “There must be public funding for abortions for poor women.”
Abortion is a sensitive subject for Rudy, which requires a delicate balancing act. For instance, he once supported late-term abortion. He now opposes it. Will he now also flip-flop on taxpayer-funded abortions? How about the global gag rule?
Whatever he does, one thing is crucial: how he responds to the response. Even though the video was uploaded yesterday, as of this writing, it’s already been viewed 71,334 times. That’s a considerable number, and Rudy’s silence will only generate further skepticism and confusion.
My advice: take a page from Mitt Romney’s communications shop. When potentially devastating video of the then-moderate governor’s 1994 debate with Ted Kennedy surfaced on YouTube last month, within hours “GovMittRomney” had uploaded a response, showing Romney on the phone discussing the video with a reporter.
In one swift and sharp swoop, Team Romney avoided another macacca moment, and the resultingstories highlighted the push back instead of the controversy.
Posted by Jonathan Rick in 
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