Republican extremism in Virginia has made Romney distasteful to voters. (Virginia Guard Public Affairs, Creative Commons)

This advice sounded silly to me at the time; after all, when most people think about the attributes of a great baseball player they think of speed, strength, awareness, or some other characteristic exemplified by a world-class athlete, not maintaining balance. It wasn’t until I fell on my butt a few dozen times while trying to hit curve balls that I realized how right my coaches actually were.

You see, in baseball, when there’s a 90-mile-per-hour fastball coming at you, leaning too far to the right or the left can turn a homerun swing into a strikeout .

Just like the 14-year-old Chris Patterson who used to swing and miss at fastballs because he leaned too far to the right, the Virginia GOP is swinging and missing with the electorate because they’ve moved too far to one side. The problem for the GOP is that while my failure to maintain balance only cost me a spot on the varsity roster, their mistake might cost Mitt Romney an election.

The roots of the Republican Party’s woes in Virginia were planted way before this election cycle even started. In 2009, they nominated and elected a gubernatorial candidate named Bob McDonnell. McDonnell’s a very capable politician. He’s a rising star in the national Republican party, chairman of the Republican Governors Association, and there were plenty of smart people suggesting Mitt Romney might select him as a running mate. What makes McDonnell such a liability are his backward positions on social policy.

His master’s thesis betrayed a seething hostility to the gains made by women, gays and just about every other group that saw discrimination against them lessen during the latter part of the 20th century.

In his paper, McDonnell claimed that women in the workplace were “detrimental” to the family. When writing about homosexuality he argued that “the government must restrain, punish, and deter” this activity, before equating homosexuality with drug abuse and pornography. The icing on the cake was the accusation that the modern social safety net is a socialist plot to destroy the family.

Clearly, a paper written while still in school is not enough to disqualify someone from political office. People change. They mature. They gain life experience, and their views develop as they enter the real world. So, we can forgive McDonnell for views he held when he wrote his master’s thesis. After all, he was only 34 years old, and married at the time that he wrote it.

The thing is, though, that McDonnell didn’t leave his fringe beliefs in the classroom. He took them with him to the governor’s mansion, and, with the help of an equally right-wing legislature, has taken Virginia on a wild ride. Together they make up the team that gave Virginians a bill requiring that women receive a trans-vaginal ultra-sound (an invasive procedure that is just what it sounds like) before receiving an abortion. McDonnell did require that his party go back and water-down the bill, but only after receiving heat from around the country.

With politicians like these, does anyone wonder why Obama has a larger lead among women in Virginia than he does in any other state? Republicans are right, women don’t see traditional “women’s issues” as the most important issue in the election. But when the standard bearer of the state’s Republican party is on record telling women to get back to the kitchen, and the rank and file are passing bills to medically violate women, clearly traditional “women’s issues” are going to factor into some people’s decisions.

I don’t know if Bob McDonnell or his fellow Virginia Republicans are baseball fans, but if they are, I suggest they take the advice of my old high school coaches and get a little more centered.

Reach Contributor Christian Patterson here; follow him here.