McDonnell’s Crazy Thesis

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Bob McDonnell, Virginia’s GOP gubernatorial candidate, is under fire for a college thesis he wrote two decades ago. In it, he bashes “cohabitators, homosexuals and fornicators” and claims working women are “detrimental” to the family.

Since The Washington Post first revealed the thesis Sunday, McDonnell has vehemently claimed his positions have changed, while his opponent has racked up an additional 300 donors.

The treatise is the latest erstwhile paper to come back to haunt a public figure. When Michelle Obama‘s Princeton thesis about race was unearthed during the presidential campaign, more than 20 years after she originally penned it, conservatives claimed it proved she hated whites. More recently, Sarah Palin accused Ezekial Emanuel of being a “death panel“-advocate based on a paper he wrote about health care 13 years ago.

But while both these cases involved word-twisting by adversaries, McDonnell’s controversial views are much more explicit. It’s hard to claim you’re being misrepresented when you write “[W]hen the exercise of liberty takes the shape of pornography, drug abuse, or homosexuality, the government must restrain, punish, and deter,” or claim public schools should teach “traditional Judeo-Christian values.” (To read the whole thesis—which includes many other choice nuggets—click here.)

It’s not out of the question that McDonnell’s views have shifted, considering how long ago his thesis was written. But proving that’s the case is going to be an extremely uphill battle.

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In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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