Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell has been leading all of the recent polls out of Virginia, but this Washington Post story on his master's thesis has him on the defensive:

At age 34, two years before his first election and two decades before he would run for governor of Virginia, Robert F. McDonnell submitted a master's thesis to the evangelical school he was attending in Virginia Beach in which he described working women and feminists as "detrimental" to the family. He said government policy should favor married couples over "cohabitators, homosexuals or fornicators." He described as "illogical" a 1972 Supreme Court decision legalizing the use of contraception by unmarried couples.

The 93-page document, which is publicly available at the Regent University library, culminates with a 15-point action plan that McDonnell said the Republican Party should follow to protect American families -- a vision that he started to put into action soon after he was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates.

Blue Virginia has more analysis, while Twitter user @FakeVirginia has posted a page-by-page analysis of the McDonnell thesis. You can download the pdf file of the thesis on this page at the Washington Post site.

McDonnell responds,

"Virginians will judge me on my 18-year record as a legislator and Attorney General and the specific plans I have laid out for our future -- not on a decades-old academic paper I wrote as a student during the Reagan era and haven't thought about in years."

McDonnell added: "Like everybody, my views on many issues have changed as I have gotten older." He said that his views on family policy were best represented by his 1995 welfare reform legislation and that he "worked to include child day care in the bill so women would have greater freedom to work." What he wrote in the thesis on women in the workplace, he said, "was simply an academic exercise and clearly does not reflect my views."

Will voters in purple Virginia buy this explanation? Your guess is as good as mine.

If he was planning a political career, McDonnell should have followed the example of 99.9 percent of grad students: write a master's thesis on some obscure topic of no interest to a wider audience.