Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell yesterday defended himself against his own college thesis paper, saying he does not believe that women should not work or that government should discriminate against gays or unmarried people, as the thesis suggests.
The paper was written in 1989, when McDonnell was 34 and a grad student at Regent University.
Titled "The Republican Party's Vision for the Family: the Compelling Issue of the Decade," the thesis has ignited controversy around McDonnell in the past few days after the Washington Post published a story about it over the weekend.
In a 90-minute conference call with reporters, McDonnell said he does not believe all the things he wrote then and regrets some of them.
"I was simply doing an academic analysis of the impact of the changes in society," McDonnell said. "There are many things in there that I don't subscribe to at all today."
Those things include statements about the detrimental affect on families of mothers going to work outside the home, and the duty of government to "statutorially and procedurally prefer married couples over co-habitators, homosexuals or fornicators."
In the thesis, McDonnell sought to explore the reasons for a breakdown in the traditional family unit and solutions for how to protect family structures.
Overall, the thesis is perhaps not out of line with many conservatives' beliefs, in that it argues for family and church as the institutions best suited to protect the family structure in society, instead of relying on government programs. McDonnell argued that government policy should interfere in family choices as little as possible; use any government-funded public benefits to promote freedom of choice in housing and education; and that social welfare is more the responsibility of private-sector groups, like churches, than of the government.
McDonnell said his thesis was "influenced in large measure by the debate of the time," when trends of no-fault divorce and two-working-parent families were relatively new.
He does oppose abortion and same-sex marriage, and he still views the two-parent family as the "bedrock of society," McDonnell told reporters, but he opposes any discrimination against a person based on sexual orientation and believes that "the ordinary civil rights of all Virginians should be protected."
He said he supports working women, noting that two of his daughters and his wife work, and that his 2005 campaign manager, Janet Polarek, who is also a senior staffer in this campaign, is a working mother.
Asked if he regrets some of the language he used in the thesis, McDonnell said yes.
"There were any number of things in the thesis where the language would be much, much different today," McDonnell said. Anything "that denigrates the basic dignity
or worth of any human being, I very much regret that."
Staffers for McDonnell's opponent, Democratic state senator Creigh Deeds, said they don't believe McDonnell's beliefs have changed, and argued that the thesis is a "blueprint" for discriminatory policies that McDonnell still pursues.
"This paper served as a blueprint for governing. This paper laid out very explicitly his vision for the role of government, his vision for a social agenda that should dominate governance, and it even went beyond just a personal philosophy," said Deeds senior advisor Mo Elleithee. "It had a 15-point action plan for how to implement that philosophy "
As a legislator, McDonnell has pursued some of the issues he espoused in the thesis, such as covenant marriage (also supported by Gov. Tim Kaine at one time) and abortion restrictions.
McDonnell said he believes Virginians will judge him on his legislative record, not on a 20-year-old thesis paper.
He also said Virginians care about jobs, and accused Deeds of focusing on social issues.
"This election is not about some 20-year-old academic thesis," McDonnell said. "What [Virginians] are interested in is who's going to create jobs, who's going to provide opportunity for their kids and grandkids. It's not what I wrote as a college student in 1989 that people are going to evaluate me on."
McDonnell is not the first Virginia politician to get in hot water over long-ago words; in 2006 Sen. Jim Webb came under fire for an article he wrote in the 1970s that said women should not fight in the military.
Chelyen Davis: 540/368-5028
Email: cdavis@freelancestar.com