Rudy Giuliani appeared on Meet the Press this morning and defended McCain's "sex ed for kindergartners" attack ad on Obama. He tried to make his case by noting that the bill wasn't only about protecting kids against child molesters by teaching about inappropriate touching. Doing his dishonest best to make the bill sound as icky as possible, he noted that it also mentioned HIV-AIDS education starting in kindergarten (never mind that the bill said any such education should be age-appropriate).
Well, guess how things worked in the New York city school system as of 1998, i.e., right in the middle of Giuliani's tenure as mayor:
New York requires every child to take five 45-minute sessions of HIV instruction in grades K-6 and six in grades 7-12. Parents can pull their children out of the "methods of prevention" class (i.e., condoms) but not the rest. Under the kindergarten guidelines, "students will learn: the difference between transmissible and non-transmissible diseases; the terms HIV and AIDS; [and] that AIDS is hard to get."
Now, I am trying to be as rigorous about this as possible. I don't yet have a cite that demonstrates that this policy continued through the end of Giuliani's tenure. At a minimum, though, we can say that either (1) the policy started under him or (2) the policy continued to be in place 4 years into his tenure.
Rudy Giuliani: you are a mega-hypocrite. You are a deity of hypocrisy. Mere mortals pray to you for strength when attempting to execute great feats of hypocrisy.
Tom Brokaw and MTP staff: This was not very hard for me to find. I am not a professional. If you type
"new york city" "public schools" "sex education" kindergarten
into Google, the article I found is on the front page. If you know that you're going to have Giuliani on your show, and you know you're going to ask him about the sex-ed ad, is it unreasonable to expect you to have found out about New York City's policy under Giuliani? Giuliani was the mayor of New York, not Salt Lake City. Is it surprising that the school system had a vigorous sex-ed program?
Update: To be fair to Giuliani, I should note that he did not have total control over the school system while he was mayor, and he had some disparaging things to say about it at the time. For a more compelling case of hypocrisy, check out my diary on Bush administration policy regarding sex ed for kindergartners.