McDonnell who is running for Governor of VA

[fabrisse]

Virginia has been getting more and more conservative since I was in ninth grade. It worries me. It bothers me enough that I made a conscious decision not to live in the Commonwealth, but rather in the District even though the job I came here for was a Virginia based job.

McDonnell told a reporter about his joint MA/JD thesis. It's a PDF.

I want to be clear. He brought it up in a public interview. Now that people have found it online and are actually reading it, he's trying to make it a "youthful folly." (He was 34 when he wrote it.) If the man has reconsidered and moderated his views, that's all to the good. But I don't think it's wrong for the people of Virginia to want specifics on what he no longer believes.

Anyway.

I've read about half of it, and plan to finish it tonight before Criminal Minds (a good serial killer should wipe it out, right?). Still there was a comment area on The Washington Post saying "Oh, those crazy liberals are being mean." The discussion got quite heated from there. For the record, my comment is

My problems with the paper are three-fold.

The first is that he defines individualism as selfish (on page 1 of his thesis) and somehow inimical to US society. It was, at least according to our stories about ourselves (e.g.,the Thanksgiving story), our individualism that brought us here and formed this country. To try to redefine the US tradition as being about family rather than the rights of the individual, see the Bill of Rights which Virginians were instrumental in getting passed as an example of individualism, is, I think, a serious misreading of our history. See our Westerns and our myths of the cowboy if you don't think the idea of individualism has been around in US society for far longer than he posits in his opening paragraphs.

The second is his assumption that the rule of God supercedes the rule of law. He is free to believe this, but I double checked: God is not mentioned in the Constitution. We chose, as a pluralist society with many religions, to have a rule of law for this country. To argue that those laws must be subsumed under those of God (whose God? -- even Catholic and Protestant Christians often disagree about His plan) is disturbing to me as a potential voter. I want a lawmaker who believes in the law.

On a side note, early marriage in the nineteen-fifties was often the result of an illegitimate pregnancy.

And his references to the "utility of children" make me wonder whether he wants to repeal child labor laws.

He also treats the drop in SAT scores as an absolute. I'm not certain they were. More people were applying to university, from a base that was very different from the traditional upper and upper-middle class one of earlier generations. The drop may (or may not, further research would be needed on my part) relate to the fact that more people were taking the test. He doesn't seem to understand the background to the statistics he uses.

The third is the fact that he seems to want to re-criminalize all sexual activity not taking place within marriage. His sentence on page 14, "In Eisenstadt v. Baird the activist court illogically extended the Griswold notion of 'marital privacy' to unmarried persons, at a time when every state in the union made sexual intercourse between unmarried persons a crime." (emphasis mine)

Mr. McDonnell may think anyone who engages in sexual intercourse outside marriage is going to hell, but making it a crime among consenting adults disturbs me.

Comments

[thorbol.livejournal.com]

Yes, I'd want to hear from him exactly what he claims to believe now on the things you mentioned, and how hhe came to change his views from those days if he did. A number of my own views have altered, sometimes radically, since I was in my early thirties. I think I can remember reasonably well why I changed them, and hope he could too.

[riverfox.livejournal.com]

McDonnell, like others of his ilk, is a Totalitarian, or Dominionist. They have no use for the Constitution (and they constantly confuse it with the Declaration) or the rule of law. They *refuse* to understand that our founding fathers were Deists, not Christians. They purposely left 'God' out of the Constitution in order to leave religious belief up to the individual, not Government. The current batch thinking by fundamentalist Republicans and Libertarians is akin to a 6-year old throwing a temper tantrum. These people completely ignore that which is different and their aims are to rewrite laws and history (like those morons in Texas are attempting with history books) according to their beliefs and to hell with anyone who doesn't bow down to their views. If the rest of us, who I believe are the sane people, don't put a stop to this anti-earth/child/woman/gay/worker/individual/race/health nonsense, we're going to be faced with violence worse than the 60s.