Unemployment in Virginia is right around the worst it’s been in 25 years. The expected tax-revenue shortfall is around $1.5 billion. The housing market may have hit bottom, but it’s been a long, hard, fast slide. A lousy economy mitigates the traffic a bit, but it’s no real solution.

So what angle of the gubernatorial race did the Washington Post put on its front page on Sunday?

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.

Well, that’s clearly an important and relevant piece of information about the candidate. For historical perspective, in 1989, Barack Obama had been cocaine-free for about ten years and was seven years away from running for public office.

Among the controversial views laid out in the piece: “He argued for covenant marriage, a legally distinct type of marriage intended to make it more difficult to obtain a divorce.”

Hey, you know who else has that far-out view? Current Democratic governor Tim Kaine. “Kaine announced yesterday a package of family-friendly proposals that include creating a voluntary ‘covenant marriage’ option in Virginia–an issue usually championed by conservatives.”