Since this past Sunday's blockbuster Washington Post story on Bob McDonnell's Dominionist, theocratic thesis, the standard excuse we've heard from the McDonnell campaign has been some variant on, "it's not relevant because it took place sooooo long ago and now my views have changed" (unspecified as to how or why, exactly). On the one hand, it's true that the thesis was written in 1989, which is a pretty long time ago. On the other hand, McDonnell was 34 years old at that point, as old as Thomas Jefferson was when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. In other words, McDonnell wasn't a kid in college, he was an adult with a family, a military career, etc. In addition, McDonnell was just 3 years away from being elected to the House of Delegates, so this thesis - with its 15 recommended action items for the Republican Party - wasn't exactly a theoretical exercise. Perhaps most importantly, there's a tremendous amount of evidence that McDonnell's views didn't change - certainly not in any significant way - once he was elected to the General Assembly in 1992. To the contrary, as Sen. Russ Potts (R) said the other day, McDonnell "was out of the mainstream all those many years and, over the whole 16 years we served together, he was out of step with the mainstream then." Or, as former Del. Jim Dillard (R) said, McDonnell's "record has been one of pushing social issues the entire time he’s been in the Assembly." Or, as former Sen. Marty Williams (R) said, McDonnell focused "mostly on social issues and crime issues" while in the General Assembly. Williams added, "I've read that thesis, and I think about Bob, and ii's the Bob I've always known."
Now, we have even more evidence that Bob McDonnell hadn't fundamentally changed his (fundamentalist) views about sex as late as 2003, just 6 years ago. Check this out from former Daily Press reporter Terry Scanlon, who was covering the General Assembly in 2003 and who "originally reported then Del. Bob McDonnell's comments about sexuality and judgeships in Virginia" (specifically, " an effort in the General Assembly in 2003 to end the judicial career of Verbena M. Askew, a Circuit Court judge from Newport News who had been accused of sexual harassment by a woman who worked for her.")
...when I approached McDonnell as he hustled between meetings on the Capitol grounds, I assumed he was going to tell me that he was deferring to Dels. Phil Hamliton and Glenn Oder. That, after all, was an unquestioned tradition.So there you have it; McDonnell can claim until he's blue in the face that his thesis is ancient history and that he's mainly been focused on economic issues or whatever, but the fact of the matter is that in 2003, he was apparently obsessed with the bizarre "crimes against nature" law, and specifically a female judge who McDonnell suspected of possibly violating said law. Crazy stuff, and - as Terry Scanlon points out - that's what earned McDonnell the embarrassing nickname "Taliban Bob" (by columnist Jim Spencer).
To my surprise, McDonnell wanted to talk about a local issue. Yep, he had heard concerns about Askew.
The story (in the Daily Press) outlined very carefully McDonnell’s nuanced position. He said violating the “crimes against nature” law – that one that prohibits anal or oral sex between any two consenting adults – might disqualify someone from being judge. That alone would not disqualify a person, we quoted him as saying. "But it certainly raises some questions about the qualifications to serve as a judge," McDonnell said in the story.
A couple of hours after we talked, before the story ran, McDonnell called me to make sure I understood his position. I told him it was a great idea. So we went over it again. After we discussed it again, that’s when I asked him the embarrassing and uncomfortable question that the story became most well known for: Have you ever broken the crimes against nature law? After a lengthy pause he said, “Not that I can recall.”
He never told me I misquoted him or took his comments out of context...
Fast forward to today, as McDonnell implausibly claims he "can't recall" all kinds of things, including the 20-year-old thesis he supposedly never thought about again, his record of pushing divisive social issues in the General Assembly, or the fact that he "never claimed he was misquoted or taken out of context" in the Verbena Askew story. Do we really want someone as our next governor who exhibits signs of severe memory loss in addition to extreme and out-of-the-mainstream beliefs about women, "fornicators," gays, etc? Seems like we can do a lot better than that.
