A rate of $14 million per hour

My Sunday movie was 1946: The Mistranslation That Shifted Culture. That mistranslation was deciding two Greek words in the Bible were best translated as “homosexual.” The culture shift was that it gave the religious right a way to demonize LGBTQ people. This documentary explored the questions: Does God condemn gay people? On what proof? What does the original text say? What about translations through the ages? How did the word “homosexual” get into the Revised Standard Version in 1946? What happened once it was there? The story features Sharon Roggio, lesbian daughter of a conservative pastor. She works hard to try to maintain a relationship with him in spite of his insistence she is living in sin. There is also Kathy Baldock. She considered herself an exemplary Christian woman. She liked to hike and met Netto and the two began to hike together. Then she came to know Netto is lesbian. How could this fine friend be condemned by God? That got Baldock into researching the question. She saw it wasn’t that gay people hated the church (as church people claimed) it was the church hated gay people. She gives talks about what the Bible says and wrote about about it. I found the book online as Walking the Bridgeless Canyon, Repairing the Breach Between the Church and the LGBTQ Community. The third major person in the story is Ed Oxford. His Christian friends left when he came out and his gay friends were angry with him for staying Christian. His struggle prompted him to collect old Bibles – his oldest is from the 1500s. He found “homosexual” was not in the Bible before 1946. A ways into his research he connected up with Baldock. The effort to create the RSV translation from the original Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek was led by Luther Allan Weigle. Baldock and Oxford went to the repository of Weigle’s notes on the translation effort at Yale University. They didn’t find notes on why the word “homosexual” was chosen. But they did find a letter to Weigle dated 1959 that challenged the translation. That’s enough for you to get the direction of the story and I strongly recommend you watch it. Except that’s not easy. The movie is not on a streaming service. The producers are still trying to shop it out to movie festivals. I was able to watch it online because Reconciling Ministries Network made it available for three weeks – and I found out about it just prior to the last weekend. While I recommend seeing the film, yet knowing how difficult it would be for you to view it, I offer a summary of the rest of the story. So this is definitely a spoiler alert. Even so, my few paragraphs can’t offer the breadth of understanding the movie can. How did the word “homosexual” get into the 1946 version? Baldock points out the men (of course, they were all men) on the translation team were all born between 1880 and 1911. What did they know about homosexuality when they started the process in 1939? As pointed out before, Baldock did not find any documents on why the particular word choice was made. The challenger was David Sheldon Fearon. His call to ministry is dramatic and he accepted, though he was gay. Being gay didn’t matter to the United Church in Canada. He wrote the letter while in seminary, so it is quite scholarly. He called the error a “sacred weapon.” And Weigle acknowledged the error. But starting an updated version of the RSV wouldn’t happen until 1961 and it wouldn’t be published until 1971. When it was it did not contain the word “homosexual.” Also published in 1971 was the Living Bible. This is a paraphrase, meaning it doesn’t go for exact translation and uses language that is easier to understand. Some say paraphrases aren’t sufficiently scholarly and this one definitely was not. It worked straight from the RSV – before the corrected version was published. Also begun in the 1960s (without the benefit of the correction) was the New International Version and a couple other translations highly regarded by conservative Christians. It was the Living Bible that Billy Graham started passing out at his rallies. It quickly sold in the millions. A second edition of the Living Bible inserted the word “homosexual” in other “clobber” passages. This is more evangelical propaganda. Then about 1984 conservative religion united with politics and the tone of the Republican Party shifted radically by the 1992 Convention, when I was turned off by them. We now have the situation where many people can say my personal Bible condemns homosexuality and my Bible, they tell me, is the direct word of God. Therefore I won’t deviate from God’s condemnation of gay people. Though it is rather nice that my Bible supports patriarchy as I do and condemns deviations from it. The movie notes mistranslations have power. And if this one had not happened a great deal of religious pain inflicted on LGBTQ people might have been avoided. In the current state both sides are harmed by bad theology and focusing on LGBTQ people means the true sexual predators avoid the needed scrutiny. Towards the end as Fearon becomes more involved in trying to recover Christianity from this translation error he says he came to realize, “I wasn’t called to ministry in spite of being gay. I was called to ministry because I’m gay.” Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reported that DeathSantis accused Fox News of election interference. The Associated Press was the first to call the Iowa caucus for the nasty guy and did so about a half hour after the caucuses started not a half hour after they ended. But who in the Republican caucuses pays any attention to the AP? Then at 8:31, a half hour in, Fox News called the contest for the nasty guy. This is different. Phones started buzzing within caucus venues. Votes had not yet been cast. Sumner noted:

As a YouGov survey highlighted last year, there are 16 different media outlets that Democrats regard as highly reliable. The Associated Press is in there. So is Reuters, PBS, ABC, CBS, NBC, and the BBC. Republicans only express that level of trust for two sources. And one of them is The Weather Channel.

Then Sumner says their trust of Fox isn’t all that high. Fox has spent years villainizing journalists. If it is seen rewarding the nasty guy so obviously its position on the right may collapse. Sumner noted in 2020 the nasty guy took 97% of the vote over Bill Weld. I don’t remember him either. That’s important because... In another post Sumner reported that the nasty guy getting 51% in Iowa this year isn’t all that strong of a finish. Yeah, he got more votes. But it also means nearly half of Republican caucus goers voted against him. He’s a weak candidate in a divided party. Now think about the headlines if Biden got only 51% of the vote. In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin started with a comment of his own:

So 49% of an older, whiter, and more evangelical electorate voted against Donald Trump in a low-turnout Iowa election made up of roughly 110,300 caucusgoers. That’s higher than the average attendance of the Taylor Swift “Eras” tour—about 72,500—but not by very much.

An ABC News entrance poll was taken at caucus venues. One question asked was, “Is Trump fit to be president if convicted?” Elliott Morris tweeted the results: 63% said yes and 32% said no. Dworkin also quoted Ryan Burge:

“Here's the composition of Republican caucusgoers vs the gen pop (from the [Cooperative Election Study])”: White: 97% vs 69% 65 or older: 43% vs 22% White evangelical: 54% vs 22% Bachelor's or more:53% vs 35% Rural: 43% vs 20% And, again, it's 150K folks. There are 260M adults in the US. [final turnout was closer to 108K]

Down in the comments Gary Varvel’s cartoon showed Iowa Caucus History of Picking Presidents: Mike Huckabee, 2008; Rick Santorum, 2012; Ted Cruz, 2016; Donald Trump, 2020. In the comments of another pundit roundup there is a cartoon by Rob Rogers showing the nasty guy as a vampire feasting on the neck of Uncle Sam and saying, “Blech, Immigrants are poisoning the blood of our country!” There is also a cartoon by Dave Granlund showing Uncle Sam at a table at the Campaign Cafe. The waiter tells him “These folks will select for you...” and points to a table with two guys labeled Iowa and NH. Dartagnan of the Kos community discussed a hypothetical scenario posed by Chris Mirasola, a lecturer at Harvard Law School and writing for Lawfare. Mirasola posed the question: What are the chances of terrorist violence by nasty guy supporters if he is removed from the ballot by the Supreme Court and how might federal, state, and local governments respond to the violence? The likelihood the nasty guy is tossed from the ballot is low. The Supremes are likely to take one of many legal off-ramps to avoid repudiating the Republican standard-bearer. Let’s examine the question anyway. Mirasola poses three assumptions, all of which sound likely.

The first is that Trump’s rhetoric will grow more enraged and his calls to violence from supporters will intensify as his legal jeopardy increases. The second is that the number of his supporters willing to commit violence will increase with those exhortations. Lastly, the federal government will respond in accordance with predictable, existing practices. For the third assumption, Mirasola relies on standard, institutionalized protocols about how the chain of command operates between local, state, and federal governments.

As the Supremes take up the case assumption one will happen. If the nasty guy loses there will be violence. There will also be violence in each state that implements the decision (some won’t). There will be urgent need to guard state courts and election offices. The national guard, and perhaps even the military, will be called to do the protecting. And that might unleash “destructive forces that the American republic might not survive.” So are local, state, and federal officials preparing for this?

For the Biden administration, the question is how to logistically prepare for such events in a manner that deescalates potential civil unrest. ... As Mirasola observes, “the scale of foreseeable domestic unrest has the potential to far exceed what we experienced on Jan. 6.” ... Again, Mirasola suggests that the administration be upfront and transparent with the American people about the potential for crisis before it actually happens. Nor should Congress sit on the sidelines: It should exercise its oversight powers to ensure that the administration in fact does have a workable plan of action.

I see a problem in that last part – about half of Congress wants that violence.

But whatever may occur, there is one point that should never be forgotten: We would not be forced to consider such questions but for the malign and corrupt actions of one individual, and the cynical, cowardly, and heedless encouragement that the Republican Party has provided him.

Walter Einenkel of Kos wrote:

While the world’s richest people convene this week in Switzerland for the annual World Economic Forum, Oxfam has released a new report detailing the extraordinary increases in wealth inequality since 2020. Some of the key findings include: The five richest men in the world more than doubled “their fortunes from $405 billion to $869 billion since 2020 —at a rate of $14 million per hour.” At the same time, 5 billion humans on the planet got poorer.

That’s a million every 4.3 minutes. Einenkel quoted the Washington Post on who those five men are:

Tesla CEO Elon Musk; Bernard Arnault and his family, who own luxury goods group LVMH; Amazon founder Jeff Bezos; Oracle founder Larry Ellison; and investor Warren Buffett — increased from $453 billion in 2019 to $869 billion as of November 2023. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

Einenkel includes the expected critique of Republicans, that they do all they can to protect the rich. Which is why Republicans are annoyed with this news: An AP article posted on Kos begins:

The IRS says it has collected an additional $360 million in overdue taxes from delinquent millionaires as the agency's leadership tries to promote the latest work it has done to modernize the agency with Inflation Reduction Act funding that Republicans are threatening to chip away.