Thesis Ridiculous

Say what you will about GOP gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell, one thing is clear: He's no Michelle Obama. An Internet search about the first lady's thesis at Princeton -- a passionate study of being black at an Ivy League university -- turns up 30 times as many results as a search about McDonnell's thesis at Regent University. Of course, she was the subject of national scrutiny, while McDonnell's thesis holds little interest outside the commonwealth.

In that thesis, McDonnell wrote some things about women, the family, feminism, and homosexuality that he now disavows. He held then that feminism and women working are "detrimental" to the family, that a Supreme Court decision legalizing the use of contraceptives by unmarried persons was "illogical," and that government policy should favor married couples over "cohabitators, homosexuals, and fornicators."

The language is quaint. So is the Code of Virginia, which unlike McDonnell remains stuck in the past. State law still makes it a crime to cohabit "lewd[ly] and lascivious[ly]"; to commit various homosexual -- and, for that matter, heterosexual -- acts ("If any person carnally knows . . . any male or female person by the anus or by or with the mouth, or voluntarily submits to such carnal knowledge, he or she shall be guilty of a Class 6 felony"); and even to fornicate ("Any person, not being married, who voluntarily shall have sexual intercourse with any other person, shall be guilty of fornication, punishable as a Class 4 misdemeanor").

State lawmakers have refused to repeal these prohibitions, which suggests many of them agree with views McDonnell now says he disdains. What's more, during the past five years lawmakers passed, and voters lopsidedly approved, an amendment to the State Constitution forbidding gay marriage and approximations thereof. McDonnell's opponent, Creigh Deeds, voted for the marriage amendment. He now disavows those votes. If he's allowed to change his mind, surely McDonnell is allowed to change on various topics, too.

Both men, then, have moved to the left on certain social issues. (In the parlance of journalists more liberal than the politicians they write about, candidates who move left are said to have "grown.") So too, presumably, has Virginia Sen. Jim Webb, who three decades ago penned an article for Washingtonian magazine on why "Women Can't Fight." In that piece Webb questioned the wisdom of allowing women to attend the nation's military service academies, and raised three alternatives: (a) "a separate academy purely for women"; (b) "stop allowing women to attend the academies at all"; or (c) "close them down."

Dusty papers from the past don't affect a campaign much because a candidate's current views are far more relevant to the race at hand. That's why Webb's lengthy, well-researched, and carefully thought-out article on women in combat produced barely a ripple during his campaign against George Allen, while Allen's momentary, off-the-cuff "macaca" remark ruined the race for him.

The real question is what McDonnell currently believes. On that score he remains open to criticism -- particularly regarding abortion, which he opposes even in cases of rape and incest. His support of covenant marriage seems less pyrotechnic, given that he shares the view with fellow Catholic Tim Kaine. Regardless, his writings from his days at Regent likely will change few votes in November. Old theses might be entertaining to read, but the last ones to have any enduring effect were nailed to a church door by Martin Luther.