"Mr. Gates and Ms. French Gates met at work. He was technically her boss. He ran Microsoft..."

"... and she began working there in 1987 as a product manager the year after she graduated from college. Throughout their relationship, the two have played up the cute aspects of their office romance. He flirted with her when they sat together at a conference, then asked her out when they ran into each other in a company parking lot, according to Ms. French Gates, who described their relationship’s beginnings during a public appearance in 2016. Long after they married in 1994, Mr. Gates would on occasion pursue women in the office.... Six current and former employees of Microsoft, the foundation and the firm that manages the Gates’s fortune said those incidents, and others more recently, at times created an uncomfortable workplace environment. Mr. Gates was known for making clumsy approaches to women in and out of the office.... Some of the employees said... he did not pressure the women to submit to his advances for the sake of their careers, and he seemed to feel that he was giving the women the space to refuse his advances. Even so, Mr. Gates’s actions ran counter to the agenda of female empowerment that Ms. French Gates was promoting on a global stage. On Oct. 2, 2019, for example, she said she would spend $1 billion promoting 'women’s power and influence in the United States.'"

From "Long Before Divorce, Bill Gates Had Reputation for Questionable Behavior/Melinda French Gates voiced concerns about her husband’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and a harassment claim against his money manager. He also had an affair with an employee" (NYT).

Imagine spending a billion dollars to promote a message — to bullshit the masses — while you are blithely violating that message within your personal business realm, where people are trying to make their own little living. What royal hypocrisy! 

I don't know the facts first hand, and maybe none of these allegations against Bill Gates are true, but it seems that Melinda Gates — Ms. French Gates — is wisely choosing to disengage her reputation from his. She wants a feminist message? She's got to lop him off.

AND: It's so interesting, these marriages that begin in a workplace setting. Do they not originate in interactions like the interactions that become the evidentiary basis for claims that there is a discriminatory hostile workplace? But the success of the relationship makes all the difference. This one interaction grew into a marriage. I think of all the professors who are married to former students. That seems so nice for the lovely couple — we participate in the playing up of the cute aspects — but what's in the larger picture? Was it just that one magic student who was perceived as wifely material? We gamely presume so, we with our enjoyment of cute aspects.

"I originally saw this story somewhere other than WaPo that had pictures of the pastor, unlike WaPo, which just shows this skinny cross."

"The pastor is himself quite chubby. I guess WaPo chose to focus us on the serious sexism rather than the comedy."  

I wrote, over at Facebook, where my son John posted the WaPo article "Pastor says women may not be ‘epic trophy wife’ but should be thin for their husbands. He’s now on leave." 

WaPo illustrates its piece with a stock photo of a steepletop cross. 

The article I'd seen was in The Daily Mail: "Missouri pastor goes on leave after sexist sermon in which he told women to 'lose weight' and look less 'butch' as he hailed Melania Trump as 'the epic trophy wife.'"

You can listen to 22 minutes of the sermon here. 

The top-rated comments at The Daily Mail are about the pastor's own weight problem, so I can see why WaPo chose to exclude this part of the story. It's the Era of That's Not Funny. Don't be laughing. 

And by the way, the pastor was straining to be funny. Example:

“Praise God for makeup,” he said. “It’s like Bondo for dented vehicles. And it’s like crack filler for your drywall.”

Imagine going all the way to church and sitting there listening to that. I'd be thinking, man, I could watch any random stand-up special on Netflix. 

WaPo quotes an American studies professor, Kari J. Winter:

"Women are pressured from the time we’re born to believe that if we support patriarchal power, we’re going to be rewarded... The really toxic dynamic is it’s not so much which model of womanhood but that men in power have the right to define what a woman should look like and reduce her to her appearance.... Melania models that."

"Some may wonder why an innocent man would ever plead guilty. Anyone who knows how the system works in practice..."

"... would understand why an innocent man—or a defendant in a close case—might be coerced into pleading guilty. The cruel reality is that if a defendant pleads not guilty and is found guilty, the sentence will be far greater than if he had pled guilty—perhaps even 10 times greater. Moreover, in this case, it is alleged that the government threatened, if Flynn did not plead guilty, to indict his son. These are the kinds of pressures routinely used by prosecutors. Civil libertarians have long been critical of these pressures, but fair-weather civil libertarians refuse to object when these improper tactics are used against Trump's associates. Partisan hypocrisy reigns."

Writes Alan Dershowitz in "Flynn Was Innocent All Along: He Was Pressured to Plead Guilt" (Gatestone Institute).

A love story for the age.

"The scientist whose advice prompted Boris Johnson to lock down Britain resigned from his Government advisory position on Tuesday night as The Telegraph can reveal he broke social distancing rules to meet his married lover. Professor Neil Ferguson allowed the woman to visit him at home during the lockdown while lecturing the public on the need for strict social distancing in order to reduce the spread of coronavirus. The woman lives with her husband and their children in another house."

The Telegraph reveals.

It's not the adultery. It's the hypocrisy.