Does Bob McDonnell Want to Outlaw Non-Marital Sex?

Does Robert McDonnell, the Republican candidate in the Virginia governor's race, believe non-marital sex is a crime?

McDonnell, who was widely regarded as leading Democrat Creigh Deeds in the off-year election, has hit a rough patch of his own making -- or writing. The 1989 master's thesis he submitted to the evangelical Regent University -- titled "The Republican Party's Vision for the Family: The Compelling Issue of the Decade" -- was unearthed by The Washington Post this past weekend, and it contained the sort of stuff oppo researchers die for. In the 99-page document, McDonnell outlined a battle plan for social conservative warriors that called for the usual things: make abortion illegal, oppose gay rights, bring religion into the schools. The Democrats and media reports have focused on how McDonnell went the extra mile by decrying working women as "detrimental" to the traditional family, blasting federal tax credits for child care expenses, and denouncing a Supreme Court decision overturning laws criminalizing contraception for married folks.

But while reading the full document -- in which McDonnell asserted, "Each institution in society has been instituted by God for specific, limited purposes" -- I learned that McDonnell had been a true fundamentalist, for he had written approvingly of laws that made sexual intercourse outside of marriage illegal.

Slamming the Supreme Court for its 1965 Griswold decision preventing states from outlawing contraception for married people, McDonnell huffed,

In the context of the overall thesis, written when McDonnell was 34 years old, this passage sure makes it appear that McDonnell fancied laws that banned sex between people not wed to one another. Later in the thesis, he noted that Eisenstadt v. Baird and other Supreme Court decisions had led to "the perverted notion of liberty that each individual should be able to live out his sexual life in any way he chooses without interference from the state."

Not only did McDonnell believe that the state could ban the sale of contraception to married and unmarried people, he thought the state had the right in certain circumstances to criminalize sex between consenting adults. This was in 1989, years after the sexual revolution had gone mainstream.

Since the Post first reported the contents of McDonnell's thesis, he has said that his views have changed on many of the issues he addressed in this paper -- particularly the role of women in the workforce. (You betcha.) As Melinda Henneberger notes, he has attempted to pass off his anti-working women sentiments as in keeping with his religion -- a Catholic thing. And he has dismissed the thesis as "a decades-old academic paper I wrote as a student during the Reagan era." A 34-year-old student, that is.