Democrat Creigh (Cree) Deeds is in a hotly contested Virginia gubernatorial race against the Republican nominee Robert McDonnell.  However, last Sunday’s Washington Post expose may have cooled the race down somewhat in Deeds favor.  It appears that Bob McDonnell holds some very interesting views about women in the workplace.  The GOP candidate asserts in a thesis that he wrote during law school that working women are “detrimental to the family by entrenching status-quo of non-parental primary nurture of children.”  And though he tries to explain that he no longer holds such views McDonnell wrote the thesis when he was a 34-year old married man.  McDonnell offers up as a counter argument that his wife and daughters work thus he definitely supports women in the workforce.  What he fails to mention however is that the statement is against working mothers in the workforce and his daughters are not married with children.  As for his wife, she is a few months away from being an empty nester.  In other words, no minor children at home to parent.  So the real question is has McDonnell’s views about working mothers changed at all since the tender age of 34?

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.

The 93-page document, which is publicly available at the Regent University library, culminates with a 15-point action plan that McDonnell said the Republican Party should follow to protect American families — a vision that he started to put into action soon after he was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates.

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.

A few more zingers:

He argued for covenant marriage, a legally distinct type of marriage intended to make it more difficult to obtain a divorce. He advocated character education programs in public schools to teach “traditional Judeo-Christian values” and other principles that he thought many youths were not learning in their homes. He called for less government encroachment on parental authority, for example, redefining child abuse to “exclude parental spanking.” He lamented the “purging of religious influence” from public schools. And he criticized federal tax credits for child care expenditures because they encouraged women to enter the workforce.   “Further expenditures would be used to subsidize a dynamic new trend of working women and feminists that is ultimately detrimental to the family by entrenching status-quo of nonparental primary nurture of children,” he wrote.

Read full article here.