The Problem with Bill Gates

By R.J.Snell
Crisis Magazine

With almost $40 billion in assets, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation possesses incredible influence, and is unafraid to use it. As one staffer put it, the foundation’s greatest strength is “setting agendas, framing debates, advocating the foundation’s point of view and taking action … an unchecked way of getting things done,” although some might find this worrying given the propensity of free peoples to hold checks and balances rather dearly.

Of late, the foundation has devoted enormous resources to school reform, even though some teachers and parents remain skeptical of Gates’ experimental schools and of the Common Core, to which many retain a visceral antipathy.

Even with billions invested in that campaign, the foundation shows no signs of donor fatigue, and is, in its own words, “always looking for new ways to foster and accelerate innovative ideas that can improve, and even save, people’s lives.” In this context, funding the “next generation” of condoms which make sex feel better. As Chris Wilson, the foundation’s director of global health discovery, wrote in a news release on condom funding in June, they’re “continually impressed by the talented people … with exciting ideas that can help address issues of great importance to women and children.”

Birth control is in the news, with the Hobby Lobby decision prompting feverish reactions, including some downright wild claims on how the five white male members of the Supreme Court had made Christianity the official religion of the United States, trampled the constitutional right to free contraception, and all but precluded women from the social and economic aspects of our common life. With all this chatter, the foundation’s interest in prophylactics made of leftover beef tendons (!) seems insignificant, but far more noteworthy is their investment in remote control birth control.

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R. J. Snell is Associate Professor of Philosophy and director of the philosophy program at Eastern University where he co-directs the Agora Institute for Civic Virtue and the Common Good. He is the author (with Steve Cone) ofAuthentic Cosmopolitanism: Love, Sin, and Grace in the Christian University. His new book is The Perspective of Love: Natural Law in a New Mode.