McDonnell says his opinions have changed since ’89

RICHMOND — Thrown on the defensive over his conservative origins, Republican gubernatorial nominee Bob McDonnell is disavowing views on working women, gays and divorce in a paper he wrote as a law student two decades ago at the university founded by religious broadcaster Pat Robertson.

But Democrats say the paper exposes the true ideology -— and agenda — of a candidate who, they contend, is attempting to represent himself as a centrist by emphasizing economic themes to Virginia’s recession-anxious voters.

In what Democrats and independent analysts suggest may be a turning point in the campaign for McDonnell’s lagging opponent, R. Creigh Deeds, the Republican was forced off-message Monday in an attempt to contain the controversy over his graduate-school thesis.

McDonnell also said Deeds, trailing by 7 to 15 percentage points in published polls, is attempting to use the thesis to invigorate a Democratic base that has been slow to rally to the Bath County state senator.

McDonnell, a former state attorney general, accused Deeds of running a “backward-looking campaign that focuses on former presidents, former governors and a term paper” while offering no proposals on transportation and education.

But Mo Elleithee, a senior strategist for the Deeds organization, said Democrats view the McDonnell report as a “blueprint for [a] governor,” adding: “This is who Bob McDonnell is. ... He gives us no reason to believe this is not how he would govern.”

In an 80-minute conference call with reporters, McDonnell responded point by point to positions that he took in the paper he wrote in 1989 as a 34-year-old graduate law and public-policy student at Regent University in Virginia Beach.

Written two years before McDonnell’s election to the House of Delegates, the master’s thesis lays out his views that working women and feminists are “detrimental” to the family and that government policy should be weighted to couples over “cohabitators, homosexuals or fornicators.”

Claiming his views at the time had been shaped by his Catholic faith, Army service and Reagan-era Republicanism, McDonnell nonetheless said his perspective has changed on such issues as women in the workplace, homosexuality and divorce - all of which he depicted in his thesis as threats.

McDonnell noted that his wife, Maureen, has worked and that one of their daughters, a former Army communications officer, completed a combat tour in Iraq and now is employed by a defense contractor in Chesapeake.

As for gays, McDonnell said that in hiring decisions as attorney general, he was interested only in candidates’ qualifications and not their sexual orientation. McDonnell, however, made no mention of an opinion he wrote early in his term in which he said Gov. Timothy M. Kaine acted illegally in vowing to protect gay state employees from discrimination in the workplace.

Kaine, during a question-and-answer session at a housing conference in Richmond yesterday, alluded to the McDonnell opinion, adding that the graduate paper appears to reflect “the governing philosophy of Virginia, if Bob is elected.”

On divorce, McDonnell said he believes marriage remains a bedrock of the family, but there are other ways to encourage couples to stay together. That includes counseling as well as covenant marriage, a concept supported by Kaine, under which husbands and wives pledge to take extra steps to preserve their union.

Jeff E. Schapiro is a staff writer for the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

Staff writer Jim Nolan contributed to this report.