Blogs For McCain

Ryan Sager is less than thrilled. That makes two of us.

In a shocking departure from his previously stated position on civil unions, Mayor Giuliani came out to The New York Sun yesterday evening in opposition to the civil union law just passed by the New Hampshire state Senate.

“Mayor Giuliani believes marriage is between one man and one woman. Domestic partnerships are the appropriate way to ensure that people are treated fairly,” the Giuliani campaign said in a written response to a question from the Sun. “In this specific case the law states same sex civil unions are the equivalent of marriage and recognizes same sex unions from outside states. This goes too far and Mayor Giuliani does not support it.”

The Democratic governor of New Hampshire, John Lynch, has said publicly that he will sign the civil union law.

On a February 2004 edition of Fox News’s “The O’Reilly Factor,” Mr. Giuliani told Bill O’Reilly, when asked if he supported gay marriage, “I’m in favor of … civil unions.”

He also said, “Marriage should be reserved for a man and a woman.”

Asked by Mr. O’Reilly in the interview how he would respond to gay Americans who said being denied access to the institution of marriage violated their rights, Mr. Giuliani said: “That’s why you have civil partnerships. 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.”

In 1998, as mayor of New York City, Mr. Giuliani signed into law a domestic partnership bill that a gay rights group, the Empire State Pride Agenda, hailed as setting “a new national benchmark for domestic partner recognition.”

Despite Mr. Giuliani’s long history of supporting gay rights — or rather, because of it — yesterday’s statement is likely to lead many observers to question whether the former mayor is concerned that his socially liberal record and positions aren’t flying in the Republican primary. While he still holds a commanding lead in the national polls, he has taken a hit over the last month or so after reiterating his support for the public funding of abortion.

“Why would you want to take a position where you are splitting hairs, when you have been so consistently on the record as for civil unions?” a Republican pollster reached for comment yesterday evening by the Sun, Tony Fabrizio, asked. “You can’t turn around at the eleventh hour and say this comes a little too close to marriage and then not support it.”

New Hampshire, home to the first-in-the-nation primary, is the second state — after Connecticut — to adopt civil unions strictly through its Legislature, without any order from its courts.

The New Hampshire law is titled, “An act permitting same gender couples to enter civil unions and have the same rights, responsibilities, and obligations as married couples.” It specifies that New Hampshire will recognize civil unions from other states.

The Connecticut law is structured similarly, equating civil unions to marriages and recognizing civil unions from other states. The Vermont and New Jersey civil union laws are also similar.

Mr. Giuliani’s position on the New Hampshire law puts him in the company of the former governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney, the only other major presidential candidate from either party who opposes the New Hampshire law.

“Governor Romney opposes the New Hampshire bill,” Mr. Romney’s campaign said yesterday. “He is a champion of traditional marriage. As governor of Massachusetts, he has a clear record opposing same sex marriage and civil unions.”

Senator McCain of Arizona said the issue was one of states’ rights and took no position on the New Hampshire law specifically. “While, as a federalist, John McCain recognizes the right of the state of New Hampshire to regulate the institution of marriage and to pass civil union laws, he strongly believes in the current law that declares that no other state should be legally bound to recognize same sex marriages or unions that might be legal in other places,” Mr. McCain’s campaign said in a statement.

Senator Clinton, Senator Obama of Illinois, and a former senator from North Carolina, John Edwards, all support the New Hampshire law but oppose gay marriage.

Kudos to Sen. McCain for reacting to this issue in both a politically smart way and in a way that emphasizes a respect for separation of powers and federalism. McCain’s response was the best one a Republican presidential candidate could give due to the current composition of the GOP as well as the trajectory of the western world on the legal status of same-sex unions. While the public both in our country and in the West as a whole continue to become far more willing to provide same-sex couples with many of the benefits of marriage, most GOP primary voters are still opposed to such changes in the law. That means that each GOP candidate for president finds himself in a no-win situation when asked to address the issue of civil unions, with support for such arrangements ticking off a good number of primary voters and opposition to civil unions reeking of a futile attempt to stand athwart history yelling, “stop!”

Unlike in many cases, where the GOP field could simply decry judicial activism to get around addressing the substance of the issue, New Hampshire has gone about changing the law the correct way: via the political process. As such, this was a tricky issue for the Republican presidential candidates to address, but I believe McCain came out shining while Rudy unfortunately seems to be overcompensating for his recent abortion gaffes. McCain is correct that what the people of New Hampshire choose to do with their marriage laws is the business of one and only one entity: the people of New Hampshire. Considering that Sen. McCain is running for President of the United States, his view on this particular piece of legislation is irrelevant to the job for which he is applying. That’s because the presidency is a constitutional office and not the seat of an omnipotent god-king charged with using all means necessary to exercise his divine will. Such notions were supposedly buried many centuries ago.

Supposedly.

In any case, I believe Rudy’s response will simply yield another YouTube firestorm which will draw attention both to past positions that many GOP primary voters won’t like, as well as perhaps convince some other young idealist not yet mugged by reality to don a dolphin suit and start following the Mayor around to various campaign stops. If I were advising Rudy, I’d suggest that he support social conservatives on issues where the public is generally in agreement with them, such as abortion funding, while being more of a big-tent guy on issues like gays in the military or civil unions, where public sentiment is increasingly at odds with the views of so-cons. The abortion gaffes of early 2007 were unfortunate, but the way to correct them is to continue to make concessions on the specific issue of abortion, where the pro-life/pro-choice divide in this country is pretty much stagnant, where there are more single-issue pro-lifers than pro-choicers, and where pro-life candidates have won the last 5 of 7 presidential elections. Team Rudy should never begin to think that the answer to liberal views on abortion is a hardline agenda on gay issues. Such a move will only turn off gay-friendly libertarian-conservatives and moderates while doing little to move pro-life social conservatives.