His entire legal strategy is to “Throw Maureen Under the Bus” – namely his lawyers and those of his co-defendant wife Maureen are portraying Ms. McDonnell as a “basket case” who set up a lot of funny meetings with snake oil salesman Jonnie Ray Williams Sr., accepted expensive gifts from him with promptly telling her husband, and communicated with him 1,200 times in about a year and a half (one day it was 52 text messages.)

She is bad and deceptive. He is good and didn't know much about her messy friendship with Williams. She is guilty. He is innocent (or so it goes).

Former Virginia governor Robert F. McDonnell’s defense strategy follows the oldest in written history, which, reduced to its simplest form, is: The woman gave me the apple.

Barbara DeLouise, Bethesda

He argued for covenant marriage, a legally distinct type of marriage intended to make it more difficult to obtain a divorce. He advocated character education programs in public schools to teach "traditional Judeo-Christian values" and other principles that he thought many youths were not learning in their homes. He called for less government encroachment on parental authority, for example, redefining child abuse to "exclude parental spanking." He lamented the "purging of religious influence" from public schools. And he criticized federal tax credits for child care expenditures because they encouraged women to enter the workforce.

"Further expenditures would be used to subsidize a dynamic new trend of working women and feminists that is ultimately detrimental to the family by entrenching status-quo of nonparental primary nurture of children," he wrote.

He went on to say feminism is among the "real enemies of the traditional family."

When he was governor of Virginia, Bob McDonnell proudly embraced his inner homophobe. He signed an executive order stripping state employees of anti-discrimination protections, defended the state’s ban on adoption by gay parents, and called the state’s ban on marriage equality “the right decision.”

So, of course, now that McDonnell is no longer in office and is standing trial for corruption charges, he’s living with a priest who was arrested for having sex with another man in a public place.

If you are male, you get to wear this cloak. If you are a woman, your first and foremost goal is to mind the kids and support your man and be a handmaiden to HIS career and ambitions. Watch the 1950s “Strategic Air Command” film” with Jimmy Stewart as a ballplayer pilot and his dutiful wife June Allyson. He makes the big decisions and flies the big bombers. She’s always waiting at the air base fence for him to come home so she can cook him fried eggs.