Virginia Sen. Creigh Deeds and allies of the Democratic gubernatorial candidate launched a broadside Monday against opponent Bob McDonnell’s 1989 master’s thesis, in which the Republican criticized working women and suggested governments should back married couples over gays and “fornicators.”
The assault further steers the conversation of Virginia’s governor’s race into social issues, piling on top of Deeds’ already high-profile assault on McDonnell’s anti-abortion stance.
While McDonnell dismissed the document — which he penned as a graduate student at the evangelical Regent University — as an “academic exercise,” Democrats portrayed the thesis as the work of a conservative zealot. McDonnell said some of his views had changed in the past two decades.
Deeds advisers said McDonnell, a former state attorney general and delegate, spent his career as a legislator “doggedly pursuing” the goals laid out in the document. Gov. Tim Kaine on Monday called the paper a “grave concern.”
“After years of working with Bob, I believe this article is an accurate reflection of his sincere and long-standing views,” Kaine said.
The Virginia Republican Party pushed back by framing the Democrats’ new push as a desperate bid to reverse sagging poll numbers.
Still, the content of the thesis, first reported by The Washington Post, is likely to dog McDonnell until Election Day in November as Democrats attempt to drive a wedge between the Republican and moderate voters.
McDonnell said he wrote the paper during an internship in the House’s Republican Policy Committee.
He stressed to reporters Monday that he supported women in the workplace and that he believed government should never discriminate based on sexual orientation.
He said he has proposed 105 pieces of legislation total, 92 of which became law and almost all of which were supported by Deeds.
“The idle rhetoric of the other side about me having a dramatic social conservative agenda that’s not good for Virginia is simply not true,” he said. “It’s not borne out in my legislative record.”
