Bob McDonnell's sham marriage compared to his family values masters thesis
http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2014/08/bob_mcdonnell_public_corruption_trial_how_his_marriage_defense_squares_with.html?google_editors_picks=true
Focus on the Family
What Bob McDonnell’s Regent University thesis says about his public corruption defense.
It's impossible not to see this tragedy through the rosy lens of McDonnell’s much-scrutinized graduate thesis, authored in 1989 for a master’s in public policy and a J.D. from Regent University. When the Washington Post first reported on the thesis in 2009, it kicked up something of an Internet ruckus about whether it reflected McDonnell’s actual contemporary political views on gender equality (opposed), homosexuality (opposed), birth control (ditto), and welfare (also ditto). McDonnell was 34, married, and a father when he wrote that thesis, but he passed it off as youthful musings, explaining during his run for governor, that voters should not judge him based on a “decades-old academic paper I wrote as a student during the Reagan era and haven’t thought about in years.” He publicly claimed that his views had changed over the years. But as the Post noted at the time, “during his 14 years in the General Assembly, McDonnell pursued at least 10 of the policy goals he laid out in that research paper, including abortion restrictions, covenant marriage, school vouchers and tax policies to favor his view of the traditional family.”
McDonnell’s views on marriage, family, austerity, personal responsibility, and morality as laid out in the 93-page paper, are worthy of revisiting in light of the drama now playing out in Richmond. It’s not so much a question of whether he governed by these values anymore, as whether he and his family lived by them. The thesis was an argument for infusing Christian Republican values into government policy. His view was that family is an institution that predates civil government and thus may not be defined by it. This is because “the Creator instituted marriage and family in Eden.” The family and marriage are celebrated as the best safeguard against immorality and selfishness. The thesis is a lengthy exposition on the ways modern government has disrupted and undermined traditional families and a road map back to a Christian view of the primacy of family as an organizing unit. There is a lengthy section on the evils of government-assisted child care that enables women to work. There is a bracing reminder about the need for fiscal austerity(!). There are some nice zingers about liberals (who “measure equality on a factual economic basis”). And there is a lot of talk about the evils of welfare and government aid and the need for self-reliance(!!). There are strong words for families who “reject the traditional values of responsibility and accountability.” And the tour de force comes at the end with a laundry list of the “real enemies of the traditional family—materialism, irresponsibility, feminism, lust, and ultimately selfishness,” which McDonnell concedes are largely outside the sphere of government control. Those qualities now stand as the organizing principles of the current McDonnell defense strategy, although—to be clear—the materialism, irresponsibility, lust, and selfishness are all massed on Maureen’s side of the ledger. And the dreaded feminism is nowhere in evidence.
You need read no further than Page 39 of the document, where McDonnell whimsically muses: “Must government subsidize the choices of a generation with an increased appetite for the materialistic components of the American Dream?” to understand the real failure of the thesis as a political and moral argument: Materialism and greed know no ideological, class, or religious bounds. It isn’t just the greedy welfare beneficiaries who are seduced by the need for pretty, pretty things.
Yet the lectures about morality and austerity unerringly seem to come from the guy with the free Rolex. People who live in glass governor’s mansions really shouldn’t throw stones.
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