Bob McDonnell’s Thesis

I’ve been remiss in not discussing the revelations about Virginia Gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell’s outrageously right-wing master’s thesis:

At age 34, two years before his first election and two decades before he would run for governor of Virginia, Robert F. McDonnell submitted a master’s thesis to the evangelical school he was attending in Virginia Beach in which he described working women and feminists as “detrimental” to the family. He said government policy should favor married couples over “cohabitators, homosexuals or fornicators.” He described as “illogical” a 1972 Supreme Court decision legalizing the use of contraception by unmarried couples.

McDonnell is, obviously, trying to dismiss this as irrelevant old news. But by the same token, stuff you do when you’re 34 can’t just be written off as youthful indiscretion. I’m six years younger than McDonnell was when he wrote that stuff, and I certainly expect people to take what I write as a serious expression of my views. Now that’s not to say that I can promise I’ll still believe all the things I believe today twenty years from now. The idea that McDonnell’s views have evolved is certainly plausible. That said, this was only two years before his first election—there’s not some big mysterious gap in which he could have had a wholesale change of opinion hidden from public view.

Which leaves the issue of the public record. It would be one thing if McDonnell entered electoral politics as the kind of fire-breathing bigot suggested by his thesis and then moderated, in public view, over the years. But instead we have no real indication of what he thought at any given time or what kind of agenda he may really have. Obviously, lots of politicians may have extreme views that they don’t articulate on the campaign trail out of political pragmatism. But voters are legitimately interested in that kind of subject. Ultimately, though, we’ll never know what he “really” thinks and this kind of thing can’t outweigh one’s actual record in office. Still, as the Washington Post notes that’s a pretty conservative record: “During his 14 years in the General Assembly, McDonnell pursued at least 10 of the policy goals he laid out in that research paper, including abortion restrictions, covenant marriage, school vouchers and tax policies to favor his view of the traditional family.”