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Gov. McDonnell (left) greets Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli before his State of the Commonwealth address. Both indicated support for anti-discriminatory laws in Virginia. |
LAST THURSDAY, Gov.
He was entirely correct
After all, late last summer, prior to the election for governor of Virginia, The Washington Post printed a story about GOP candidate Bob McDonnell's thesis as a public policy and law student at Regent University. The thesis was titled "The Republican Party's Vision for the Family: The Compelling Issue of the Decade."
In his thesis, McDonnell wrote about family, women, and politics. Creigh Deeds, the Democrat, well behind in the polls, seized on his words as evidence of McDonnell's extremism, and attempted to portray his opponent as another in a long line of Republican ultraconservatives. Deeds hoped that voters would see McDonnell not as "Bob's 4 Jobs" or a new breed of Virginia Republican, but as someone who would take Virginia back to the ineptitude of Jim "No Car Tax" Gilmore, to the meanness of George "Macaca" Allen, or to a would-be senator "Convicted Felon" Oliver North.
(Candidate North was the perfect example of the GOP motto: "Would rather be 'right' than elected.")
Democrat Deeds was seen as the desperate candidate that he was. "Running scared" was how opinion writers saw it. Deeds was taking the low road; mud-slinging in a fashion similar to "swift-boating" or being unkind to that sweet Sarah Palin.
When this latest example of state-sanctioned discrimination was revealed, I was beginning to think that we should have paid closer attention to Gov. McDonnell's thesis after all. The House of Delegates had tabled legislation that would have barred discrimination in the state work force based on sexual orientation, and the governor at first refused to take
In 1989, when McDonnell was 34, he wrote: "Every level of government should statutorily and procedurally prefer married couples over cohabitators, homosexuals, or fornicators. The cost of sin should fall on the sinner, not the taxpayer." He further stated that government should intervene on societal issues, writing that "man's basic nature is inclined towards evil, and when the exercise of liberty takes the shape of pornography, drug abuse, or homosexuality, the government must restrain, punish, and deter."
Ah, yes, the "evil" of homosexuality.
The McDonnell campaign responded to the Post article, with its quotations from his 93-page thesis, by indicating that it was "decades old." (Yes, two of them.) The words "youthful indiscretion"--which might have prompted more than a few chuckles--were not specifically used in reply, and the campaign moved smartly along to the candidate and the issues of 2009.
A CHANGED MAN?
Critics who said McDonnell's opinions had not changed since 1989 regarding the role of women in the family and in government certainly overlooked the facts that he has appointed women to key positions in his campaigns and his administration, and has a daughter who served in Iraq. But with this issue of homosexuality, it seemed that McDonnell's words were prophetic, in an administration but 2 months old.
In 1923, a young(er) Adolf Hitler (age 24) began writing his seminal work, "Mein Kampf," while imprisoned for his failed Beer Hall Putsch in Munich. In it,
One decade later, he was chancellor of Germany. Two decades later, fascist Germany had unleashed a world war, and the "final solution" was well under way.
Although "Mein Kampf" was written primarily for the followers of national socialism in Germany, and not seen as a prediction for what was to come, clues to Hitler's views were evident. And while Hitler did not there indicate an intention to oversee a state-sanctioned murder of Jews, Poles, Gypsies, other non-Aryans, and the mentally infirm, his ideas about race and religion were apparent.
I'm not equating Gov. McDonnell's thesis at Pat Robertson's university with Hitler's story. However, I do question how Virginians were so accepting of his explanation for it, and how we were willing to dismiss such a telling document as little more than an exercise in semantics. We were willing to believe he had somehow evolved. Well, perhaps his about-face on this recent episode is an indication that he has.
I wish, however, that he had taken the high road to begin with--before Virginia became the butt of jokes on "The Daily Show"--and I remain concerned that he says it's up to the legislature to change the law that defines what classes of people deserve protection under the state's human rights' act.
But for his willingness to say that "discrimination will not be tolerated" in Virginia, I give the governor full points.
Yet I remain skeptical that Bob McDonnell or our attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, are new-and-improved Virginia Republicans. I won't be so easily fooled again into thinking that they or future Republican candidates for state office are much different from what they have been since the truly great Linwood Holton left office.
Karen Owen is Viewpoints editor
