Dan Casey is The Roanoke Times' metro columnist.

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Dan Casey

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The other night, after reading the 1989 master's thesis by GOP gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell, I had a dream.

In it, the Casey family was a traditional family, with traditional family values. And my wife of 22 years was a traditional wife.

She didn't work outside the home. Instead, she kept it clean. And she stayed there and raised our four children.

A three-course, made-from-scratch dinner was on the table each night when I arrived home after a hard day of answering the phone and pounding the keyboard.

At all times, her hair was perfectly coiffed. She always wore a dress, just like June Cleaver in the sitcom "Leave It to Beaver."

She never expressed any feminist notions that would undermine our family. Father always knew best, she would tell the kids.

If I happened to notice a speck of lint on the living room rug, and kindly and paternally suggested she go over it with the vacuum once again, she never once snapped, "Why don't you get off your lazy butt and give me some help around here?"

She never asked me to leave work early to pick up one of our four children at dance or soccer practice.

Or to help our kids with their homework. Or to scrub a pot after dinner. Or to help her put our kids to bed.

She did all that mom/housewife stuff.

Not everything was perfect, of course.

As you might imagine, my wife was secretly, and desperately, unhappy. But her options were severely limited.

She couldn't get a simple no-fault divorce. The "covenant marriage" law forbade that, except under a few egregious circumstances, such as physical abuse or habitual drunkenness.

My eldest daughter was pregnant. In part, that was because schools were barred from teaching sex education or offering students access to contraceptives. Abortion was not an option, because her pregnancy didn't endanger her life.

My wife couldn't work because we couldn't afford child care for all of our children. The government offered no child-care tax credit to help us pay for that.

And even if she had worked, there was no guarantee her employer would grant her family leave if she had a baby. That was up to the company, not us.

Now, it is a bit of a stretch to assume that all of the above would necessarily flow from the thesis McDonnell wrote back in 1989, when he was 34 years old.

After all, it was a dream, and we all know how weird those can be.

But much of this fantasy could logically flow from ideas and notions that McDonnell expounded upon over 93 typed, and rather fantastic, pages.

McDonnell criticized the Supreme Court's 1965 decision that allowed married couples access to birth control without governmental interference.

He lauded "covenant marriage," and called for the appointment of judges that respect it over no-fault divorce.

He said position-protecting family leave should be voluntary for employers, rather than a right of employees.

And he called for restricting spending on sex education in the schools and contraceptives for students, and for laws that end women's access to abortion for almost any reason.

Such notions could help to increase teen pregnancy, create families with more mouths than they are able to feed, chain spouses into the slavery of deeply unhappy marriages and severely limit women in the work force.

Now that he is running for governor, McDonnell is distancing himself from these views, in spite of his years of legislating for such an agenda as a state lawmaker.

If we take him at his word, we can suppose that my dream would never be realized. That is a good thing.

Because it would be a nightmare for many Virginians.