Deeds Can Change Attitudes, Too!

RICHMOND, Va. -- Democrat R. Creigh Deeds said Thursday that some of his own beliefs have changed in the past 20 years, as he attacked his Republican foe in the governor's race for a conservative thesis written in 1989.

At a news conference that featured women denouncing the paper Bob McDonnell wrote, Deeds said changing times had changed his views, though he didn't identify which ones.

After The Washington Post reported details of the thesis Sunday, McDonnell renounced some arguments he made in the paper, saying life experiences and those of his two grown daughters in the work force had changed him.

McDonnell said he no longer believes that working women and feminists are detrimental to families or that the state has a right to discriminate against "cohabitators, homosexuals or fornicators."

Asked at the news conference whether there were beliefs he held at the close of Ronald Reagan's presidency that have changed since, Deeds replied, "I'm sure that there are."

"In 1989, I was 31 years old, I was a prosecutor, we'd had our third child, ... I was trying cases in Bath County every day. I'm sure there were views that were different in 1989 than they are today," he said.

When asked what they were, he said, "I don't know. I didn't write a thesis in 1989."

"I think we are all evolving as we live this life. The point of this case we have to make, the case that's been made, is this thesis Bob McDonnell wrote when he was 34 years old," Deeds said in his broadest discussion yet about the 93-page treatise that has shaken up a race in which Deeds trailed three weeks ago.

Deeds, who often describes himself in public speeches as "a work in progress," said the thesis matters because during 14 years in the House of Delegates, McDonnell sought to write many of its points into Virginia law.

Concerning his own record, Deeds acknowledged voting in the Senate in 2005 and 2006 to put the proposed state constitutional amendment banning same-sex unions in Virginia on the ballot for a statewide ratification vote. But he said he voted against it in the November 2006 referendum.

"Everybody in my family voted against it in the ballot box," he said.

Deeds, a consistent gun-rights supporter, said he dropped his opposition to closing the gun show loophole -- in which private sellers at gun shows are not required to conduct the background checks that licensed dealers must perform -- after the April 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech when a disturbed student with two handguns killed 32 people, then shot himself to death as police closed in.

"I worked hard to find solutions to address concerns brought to me by grieving parents," Deeds said.

McDonnell spokesman J. Tucker Martin said Deeds should understand, then, how McDonnell's positions have changed.

"Obviously people change over time. We understand that," Martin said.

But Deeds targeted the thesis relentlessly Thursday as a way to energize his campaign, particularly among female voters who comprise about 54 percent of the state's registered electorate. The timing was critical, too, just ahead of the long Labor Day weekend of political parades and rallies, the traditional start of the full-throttle fall campaign in Virginia.

Four women who spoke for Deeds said they don't believe McDonnell has changed his beliefs since he submitted his thesis as a requirement for his combined law and master's degree at Pat Robertson's Regent University.

"You have to remember that what he wrote was not written in 1959, nor in 1969 or '79," said Wendy Klein, a Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine professor. "It was and remains the foundation of his political life."

Klein and three other women said the thesis is a valid issue because legislation McDonnell supported in the 16 years afterward, including a vote against a resolution calling for equal pay for women.

"It's abundantly clear that Bob McDonnell does not favor a woman's right to do much of anything -- not to work, not to send their kids to day care, not to make her own choices about health care or reproductive decisions," Klein said.

Such comments infuriate McDonnell, who says Deeds knows his attitudes about women in the workplace have changed based on McDonnell's record of hiring women to senior spots in his campaigns and because McDonnell's own grown daughters work.

"Bob's oldest daughter, Jeanine, served our nation in Iraq," Martin said. "We won't take lectures about supporting working women from Creigh Deeds."