Robert Francis McDonnell, 55, was one of five children of a stay-at-home mom and a father he still describes as “a tough, Boston Irish-Catholic Air Force officer who wasn’t afraid to use the belt.”

McDonnell was hardly a rebel – childhood chums recall him as a straight-arrow type. As a teen, he scored the only touchdown Bishop Ireton High School could muster against the undefeated 1971 T.C. Williams High football team immortalized in the movie “Remember the Titans.”

McDonnell’s Catholicism drew him to Notre Dame University on a ROTC scholarship. But it was back home where he met Maureen Gardner, a Washington Redskins cheerleader who became his wife and mother of their three daughters and twin sons.

After college, McDonnell was an Army officer in Europe, then worked as an executive for a major hospital supply firm, moving as far west as Kansas City before settling his family in Virginia Beach.

Eyeing a career in law and politics, McDonnell juggled Army reserve duties, a part-time newspaper advertising sales job, and raising a growing family with studying for a combined law and master’s degree in public policy at CBN University. The school, now Regent University, was established by Christian Coalition founder and religious broadcaster Pat Robertson.

At age 34, he wrote a 93-page thesis for his graduate degree that called working women a detriment to society and argued that government was justified in discriminating against gays and unmarried “cohabitators” to shield traditional families.

Twenty years later, after a state legislative career spent advancing tough penalties for crimes and curbs on abortion, then a term as state attorney general, the thesis became the most potent issue against McDonnell in the race for governor. Still, he never trailed in polling behind Democratic state Sen. R. Creigh Deeds, whom he narrowly defeated in the 2005 attorney general’s race.

McDonnell, 55, dismissed the thesis as a long-ago academic exercise. He said raising three daughters, one of whom was an Army platoon leader in Iraq, had made him an admirer of career women.

He will become only the second Catholic governor of Virginia, succeeding the first, Democratic Gov. Timothy M. Kaine.

“Like the singer Bill, right,” she asked.

“Yes! Thank you. Not many people get thst.”

She then gave a few bars of “Lovely Day.”

I proposed marriage but she was too busy taking care of other votes.

Drop by tonight. Leave comments. I’ll do my best to inform and entertain.  New Jersey polls about to close. Virgina polls have closed. I understand turnout in Maine was high. No news about Washington yet.

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn is right. The press conferences are getting tiresome. Jack Price was minding his business, thinking he could walk to a corner store. Two culprits thought otherwise and allegedly attacked him, leaving Price with two collapsed lungs, a lacerated spleen, broken ribs and a broken jaw. As the culprits beat him, the whole affair was captured on camera, they shouted anti-gay epithets.

A suspect was arrested this past Sunday and the other—Daniel Rodriguez apparently on the run—was caught yesterday at the home of a relative in Virginia (why is it that criminals who do stuff that makes the papers  think they can get away by going to a relative’s house?). Rodriguez’s family is coming to his defense, arguing there is no way he has anti-gay animus.

“This wasn’t a hate crime,” said Christina Rodriguez, the suspects sister. “If he’s guilty of anything, he’ll man up to it.”

So now we wait for the legal system to turn its slow wheels. As for Price, he underwent surgery yesterday and at last word his condition was described as serious yet stable.

“He’s speaking,” said Price’s sister-in-law JoAnne Guarneri. “He’s our miracle. God wasn’t ready to take him yet.”

Anyone want to argue that some straight’s don’t have a certain bigotry?

Bob McDonnell’s research paper, first reported Sunday by The Washington Post, shakes up what had been a smooth campaign. McDonnell has maintained a clear lead over Democrat R. Creigh Deeds in statewide polling.

In his first public comment on the 93-page conservative manifesto he wrote at the close of the Reagan presidency in 1989, McDonnell dismissed the paper as a long-ago academic exercise. He said life had moderated views he held then that government should “prefer married couples over cohabitators, homosexuals or fornicators.” Working women and feminists were also a detriment to families, he wrote.

The treatise, titled “The Republican Party’s Vision for the Family: The Compelling Issue of the Decade,” singled out the Supreme Court’s 1973 ruling legalizing abortion and a ruling the previous year that legalized contraceptives for unmarried people. McDonnell, a Roman Catholic, has said abortions should be performed only to save the life of the mother.

Deeds’ campaign adviser Mo Elleithee said McDonnell was 34 and on the verge of running for the Virginia House of Delegates when he wrote the paper, and can’t shrug it off as misguided youth.

However, McDonnell complained that Deeds’ campaign was exploiting the thesis to suggest he supported workplace discrimination against women. He noted that his daughters have master’s degrees and that the oldest had served with the Army in Iraq.

McDonnell described himself as a “college student at the time, albeit a little older college student, within an academic environment and completely not restrained by the real policy world at the time.”

McDonnell wrote the thesis as a course requirement for his master’s and law degrees from Regent University, the Christian college founded by religious broadcaster Pat Robertson. In it, he wrote that “If the government at all levels has a duty to uphold the family, then it follows that it has the authority to legitimately discriminate in support of this goal.”

Asked if the statement still reflects his philosophy, he said it would be written much differently today.

“I don’t think the government’s got much business when it comes to cohabitation or any other living arrangements whatsoever,” he said.

Dozens were moved in an attempt to split up relationships and curb illegal sexual activity at the 1,200-inmate Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women, though some straight women were sent to the wing strictly because of their appearance, the inmates and corrections officers said.

Civil rights advocates called the moves unconstitutional punishment for “looking gay.” The warden denied that any housing decisions were made based on looks or sexual orientation, and said doing so would be discriminatory. The practice was stopped recently after the Associated Press began questioning it, according to several inmates and one current employee.

Two current guards and one of their former co-workers said targeting masculine-looking inmates was a deliberate strategy by a building manager. Numerous inmates said in letters and interviews that they felt humiliated and stigmatized when guards took them to the separate wing – also referred to by prisoners and guards as the “little boys wing,” “locker room wing” or “studs wing.”

“I’m not one who’s going to cry and say ‘Oh my god I’m in prison and they’re making my time hard,’ you know. I deserved to go for my crime and I did my time there,” said Summer Triolo, who spent nearly six years at Fluvanna for theft before being released in February 2008. “But my punishment was by the judge to do time in prison away from my family and home. That was my punishment, not all the extra stuff.”

Living conditions in wing 5D weren’t worse than the rest of the prison, and no prisoner said she was denied services other inmates received. However, the unit went on lockdown more often than others, and the women said they were verbally harassed by staff who would make remarks such as, “Here come the little boys,” when they were escorted to eat. The three guards confirmed such remarks were made.

The two current guards and former guard William Drumheller said Building 5 manager Timothy Back, who is in charge of security and operations for that area, came up with the idea to break up couples by sending inmates to the wing. Gradually, they said, the 60-inmate wing was filled with women targeted because of their appearance. The current employees asked to remain anonymous for fear of losing their jobs.

“I heard him say, ‘We’re going to break up some of these relationships, start a boys wing, and we’re going to take all these studs and put them together and see how they like looking at nothing but each other all day instead of their girlfriends,’” Drumheller said.

Drumheller said Back told him the plan one day in a prison office. The other two guards, who are both female, said Back’s reasons for moving the prisoners were commonly known among guards, though officials would deny the reasons for the moves if inmates asked or complained.

“They sort of played it off like that’s not really what they were doing,” Drumheller said.

Warden Barbara Wheeler called the policy a figment of the inmates’ imaginations.

“With female offenders, relationships are very important, and often times when they’re separated from those relationships they might perceive it as punitive,” Wheeler said.

Wheeler said her employees wouldn’t segregate inmates based on their appearance or sexual preference, and said she wouldn’t condone it if they did.

“That would be very discriminatory,” she said. “That’s like saying I want to put all the blacks in one unit and all the whites in one unit,” something federal courts have ruled illegal.

A dozen inmates interviewed in person or by letter contradicted Wheeler, saying there’s no doubt why they were moved. Triolo said she had gone four years without getting in trouble until she shaved her shoulder-length brown locks. She soon was given a new cell in 5D. She couldn’t hope to see her girlfriend in the cafeteria because her unit always went first or last to keep them away from other inmates.

Triolo and Trina O’Neal were two of the first inmates sent to 5D in the fall of 2007.

“I have been gay all my life and never have I once felt as degraded, humiliated or questioned my own sexuality, the way I look, etc., until all of this happened,” O’Neal, 33, who is serving time for forgery and drug charges, wrote to the AP.

Drumheller worked as a correctional officer at Fluvanna for two years but said he quit in August because he didn’t like the way the inmates were treated. Wheeler said she didn’t recall the circumstances surrounding his departure.

The prison declined repeated requests to make Back available for an interview, and the AP could not find a working home telephone number for him.

Sex – whether forced, coerced or consensual – is forbidden in prisons primarily to prevent violence and the spread of diseases.

Segregating gay inmates in men’s prison has been upheld by federal courts to protect them and maintain order. Courts have ruled against total isolation or harsher conditions for those inmates.

Separating women based on appearance, though, violates the Constitution’s guarantees of equal protection and freedom of expression, said Helen Trainor, director of the Virginia Institutionalized Persons Project. Trainor said civil rights and gay rights groups have been hesitant to sue because of the expense and the “certainty of failure” in the 4th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, the nation’s most conservative.

Inmates say prison officials have more aggressively policed prisoner sex since Wheeler became warden in 2004. If inmates are caught having sex they are sent to isolation. Last year, there were 59 violations for sexual acts. As of mid-April, there had been 11 this year, according to the prison.

Prison officials have taken other measures to curb sex, restricting nighttime bathroom use and reducing time cells are unlocked during the day.

Prisoners say officers also have separated couples who haven’t been caught having sex.

“Point blank, this institution is ran by homophobes, and the rules instated here are based on your sexual preference not what is right or wrong,” wrote Casey Lynn Toney.

Esther Gordon, 45, who lived in 5D, concurred.

“They’re worried about who goes with who, or who’s having sex with who,” she said. “It’s just unnecessary harassment.”

Allen, who is gay and performs in drag at nightclubs in the region, said he entered the homecoming contest as a joke, competing as Reann Ballslee, his drag queen persona.

But he considers the victory one of his happiest moments and proof that the suburban Washington, D.C., school famous for its run to the Final Four a few years back celebrates its diverse student body.

“I was very touched by how Mason was so supportive through the whole process of allowing a boy in a dress to run for homecoming queen,” Allen said in a phone interview. “It says a lot about the campus that not only do we have diversity but we celebrate it.”

The senior from Virginia’s Goochland County won the pageant at a sold-out Homecoming basketball game against Northeastern University.

Large portions of the crowd cheered as Allen, wearing a gold-sequined top, accepted the tiara and the Ms. Mason 2009 sash.

The school, known for racial diversity and a basketball team that pulled off a string of upsets to advance to the Final Four in 2006, was selected the nation’s top “school to watch” in the most recent U.S. News and World Report rankings.

Allen’s selection does not appear to have caused much consternation among the school’s 30,000 undergraduate and graduate students. An online article in the student newspaper prompted only two comments, both positive.

Alyssa Cordova, an officer with the school’s College Republicans, said she didn’t pay much attention to Allen’s election and is surprised by the media attention it has received.

“I just think it’s kind of silly,” she said.

Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equity and a former adjunct professor at Mason, said the lack of controversy “shows that the students and the George Mason community have a good sense of perspective.”

University spokesman Dan Walsch said the school is “very comfortable” with Allen’s selection and the contest rules are not sex-specific.

“It’s just that if you’re a man who runs for Ms., you’ve got to dress the part,” Walsch said.

The contest was half talent judging and half voting by the student body. Allen received the most votes but doesn’t know how he scored in the talent competition, in which he performed in zebra-print pants and lip-synched to Britney Spears.

He said his drag queen persona is fairly popular and well-known on campus – he has hosted events as Reann for the school’s Pride Week, as well as HIV charity shows and an amateur drag night cabaret.

“Reann is very sassy, very silly. She’s an entertainer throughout. She’s not afraid to do a high kick if that’s what it takes,” Allen said. “She’s got a little camp but is not as campy as some queens.”

Police learned her motive in a confession when she was terminally ill last November and made it public Friday, four days after she died.

Smith ensured the mystery would outlive her, however, when she also claimed the lead detective, now dead, helped her bury the murder weapon. Investigators swore Friday to verify that allegation and to find out why one of their own would have hidden Smith’s guilt in a case that has practically become folklore in this Shenandoah Valley city of 25,000.

“If he had anything to do with covering this thing up,” Commonwealth’s Attorney Raymond C. Robertson said as residents lined the city council chambers to hear the news, “we are hell-bent on finding out what it was and why.”

Smith, 61, died Monday, more than a month after her arrest in the deaths of 19-year-old Constance Smootz Hevener and her 20-year-old sister-in-law, Carolyn Hevener Perry on April 11, 1967. Smith told investigators she shot both women in the head in the back room of the ice cream shop because they teased her about being homosexual, Robertson and Staunton Police Chief Jim Williams said.

“That was different in 1967 than it is today, extremely different,” Robertson said. “It would have been a matter that it would have had different ramifications that it would today if it had been made public.”

Smith told police she gave the .25 caliber pistol she used to shoot the women to detective David Bocock, and they buried it.

Bocock died in 2006, leaving a wife who is now in a nursing home. Police are investigating his involvement, although they said other aspects of Smith’s confession have checked out.

“We know that’s what she told us and we’re trying to corroborate every aspect of her confession,” Robertson said.

Robertson did not know the extent of the relationship between Smith and Bocock, though he said she had practiced shooting at Bocock’s farm.

Smith swiped $138 from the store as she fled, which led police to think it was a robbery. Police initially focused on William Thomas, who told them he saw two men running from the scene. Thomas was tried for one of the murders and acquitted, but the other murder indictment remained on his record until Dec. 30, when Robertson said police were satisfied that he had nothing to do with the murders.

Thomas said having that hanging over his head for 40 years was tough, though it could have been worse.

“My loss is not comparable to what happened to those families,” Thomas said recently. “Regardless of whether those girls – there may been some things they were doing that may or may not have been correct – but certainly they didn’t do anything to deserve what happened to them, and those families didn’t do anything to deserve what Dave Bocock put them through.”

Smith moved away for a long time after the killings, got married and had two daughters, both of whom have declined to speak with The Associated Press.

About two decades after the killings, Smith returned to Staunton without her husband and moved in with a woman, living with her new partner until her death. Her partner also has turned down interview requests.

The investigation meandered until last summer, when police heard from Joyce Bradshaw, who worked with Smith at her other job. Bradshaw said she went out to grab a burger with Smith about a week before the shootings and that Smith showed her a gun and told her she had two bullets – one for her stepfather, who had sexually abused her, and one for “that Hevener girl.”

After the shootings, Bradshaw said, she told Bocock about Smith’s statements. The detective came back to her a couple of days later and told her that Smith had taken a polygraph test and passed it, and that the bullets didn’t match Smith’s gun.

Bradshaw said Bocock also mentioned that Smith was a good shot, something she took as enough of a threat that she was afraid to go back to police after that.

“I tried 41 years ago, but it just didn’t work out,” Bradshaw told the AP last week. “But I always knew that she was the one.”

Williams said police had not focused on Smith until recently because their records indicated she had been cleared.

Danny Perry, Carolyn Perry’s widower, said he was glad that now they at least know who the killer was, even if it may never really be known if others were involved.

“We’ll just have to wait and see down the road the real why and if there was a cover up,” Perry said.

Robertson said he worked with Bocock for more than a decade and that he always knew him to be a “genuinely good, responsible and competent police detective.”

Authorities promised to continue to seek the truth.

“While we are continuing to investigate this matter,” Williams said, “the fact remains that there will likely be questions surrounding this case we will never be able to answer.”

It’s a sad day for a key American family, but sadder for the state of Virginia.

Here’s hoping that tomorrow brings us enough successes to outweigh today.

A few days ago I chided Barack Obama for being timid in his response to Prop 8. He has a comfortable lead in California and a PSA or even some words from him would be very helpful to those fighting for same sex marriage

Before any Obama fans get cranky as they sip their morning coffee: I do remember that Obama’s running mate Joe Biden noted on Ellen DeGeneres’ show that if he were a California resident Prop 8 would get a no from him.

I still stand by my contention that when it comes to gay issues Obama is cautious and will sell out a gay agenda if it gets too hot (which makes him no different from any other mainstream politician). While that’s true  he does something that puts him above his peers.

Yesterday in a rally in Richmond, Virginia Obama went against the Sarah Palin theme of “real America.” Obama riffed on the idea that despite our differences we are citizens of a country we love. And in the land of the Confederacy Obama gave a shout out to gays and lesbians (thanks to my After Elton peeps for the heads up).

Whether it’s going to predominately black churches and talking about homophobia or including our concerns in his speeches, throughout this long campaign Obama keeps reminding his audiences that we matter in the country’s definition of freedom. Sure it’s just words and Obama doesn’t say anything without expecting some political payback. However, it’s refreshing to have a pol say gay and lesbian in the same sentence with the word freedom. That means something.