Don’t Back Off Now, Mac!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/29/AR2009082902434.html

'89 Thesis A Different Side of McDonnell

Va. GOP Candidate Wrote on Women, Marriage and Gays

By Amy Gardner

Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 30, 2009

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. . .

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. In 2001, he voted against a resolution in support of ending wage discrimination between men and women.

Kent comments:

Once several years ago near election day, a group sent me a mailer attacking a candidate for the U.S. Senate.  It listed all the ‘horrible’ things this candidate had done.  I thought to myself, “If he has only done half these things, I will make a point to vote for this guy!”  And I did just that.

I was about to make plans to slip across the border into Virginia to vote for old “Mac” (such things seem to be easy to do these days) until I noticed that the story went on to quote him as saying:

"Virginians will judge me on my 18-year record as a legislator and Attorney General and the specific plans I have laid out for our future -- not on a decades-old academic paper I wrote as a student during the Reagan era and haven't thought about in years."

Hey, Mac – what was wrong with what you said in your master’s thesis?  While I would prefer that ‘governmental policy’ be so minimal that it barely matters in everyday life, IF we are going to have such things, what was so wrong with your original ideas?

Feminists are definitely detrimental (I don’t need any quotes around that word) to the family.  Sometimes both parents working can be detrimental to the well-being of children.  (One of the reasons both parents sometimes feel the need to work outside the home is the high cost of intrusive government!)

If government policy is going to ‘favor’ someone, why not married couples?  Married couples are good – definitely better than homosexuals and fornicators.

And that Supreme Court decision from ‘72 about abortion – a reading of the key parts makes ‘illogical’ sound like a very mild way to describe it.

Someday, somewhere, a candidate will say these kinds of things and not back down when the leftist press attacks.  Instead, that candidate will say, “Oh yeah?  You haven’t heard the half of it yet.”  Perhaps (ha!) that candidate will not be elected.  But such a candidate will give voters a very clear choice.  And for the very little it is worth, that candidate will receive my undying admiration.