So it goes…

A…B…C.  Always Be Checking. That is to say, Always Be Fact Checking.

But first…some beauty!

Some joy arrived in the mail today. One part anxiously awaited, one part completely unexpected.

The expected joy is this vinyl of an allegedly lost recording of Dr. Karl Böhm conducting the Berlin Radio-Symphonie-Orchester in Brahms Symphony No. 4 and Richard Strauss’ Death and Transfiguration. These are two favorites. Facebook has been waving these recordings in my face ever since I ordered a copy, and I haven’t minded a bit because I got to hear passages from them until this arrived. Those couple clips convinced me that these recordings will be treasured. I paused over the repeat advertising, and listened to the clips over and over. And now I have the complete music.

The Brahms symphony, his last, is unique in that there is no musical introductory passage. Instead he gets right into it. Everything that follows emerges from that hauntingly beautiful theme. His mastery of the sonata form is complete. It is an amazing symphony, but also a very melancholic one. I have heard it said that it is his eulogy to a musical form he saw as fading away.

I must admit I’m not much impressed by the first part of Death and Transfiguration. It’s that stunningly beautiful coda that really gets to a deep soulful place inside of me. 

There is a card with instructions for downloading a digital copy, which is nice because I want these in my iTunes library.

The unexpected joy is this McCall’s magazine back issue…

I ordered it on the basis of Dick Hafer citing it for one of his statistics in his antigay comic book, “Homosexuality: Legitimate, Alternate Deathstyle” I’ve been reviewing here.

I am nowhere near this part of the book yet, but in its chapter on homosexuality and the NEA, which is basically a rant that allowing gay people to teach schoolkids is inviting child sexual abuse, Hafer cites an article in this issue of McCall’s wherein he claims “In a study reported in McCall’s magazine among school principals, they received 13 TIMES (his emphasis) as many complaints about homosexual contact between teachers and students than they did about heterosexual teachers.”

So where does Hafer get this statistic? There is a cite (#4) that points to this entry in his appendix (which he labels as “Notes”):

G. Hechinger & F.M. Hechinger, “Should Homosexuals Be Allowed To Teach?” McCall’s, 1978 105(6) 100+

So I had to go order that back issue to see who wrote it and what their credentials were. What I found to my pleasant surprise is the article was a fair reporting of the controversies over gay teachers in 1978, and the homophobic prejudices motivating them. Time and again in the article they point out that students were more likely to be approached sexually by teachers of the opposite sex. Time and again they point out that much of the controversy is motivated by beliefs about homosexuality that have no basis in fact.

There is a text box labelled “How School Principals Feel” It contains an overview of a survey the magazine did among school principals. This appears to be the source of Hafer’s factoid that school principals received 13 times as many complaints about homosexual contact between teachers and students than they did about heterosexual teachers. So I dug into it.

That statistic Hafer reports in his book, that he says came from this issue of McCall’s, isn’t there.

Nowhere.

Not in the text box where they report their findings on how school principals feel.

Not anywhere else in that article either.

Hafer is telling his readers a flat-out lie.

I was stunned at the absolute mendacity of it. But that factoid, like most of them in the Hafer comic book, feels slippery the more you look at it. “a study reported in McCall’s” What study? Hafer doesn’t say but in fact it’s the magazines own study. He could have just said that, but I reckon it makes it sound more authoritative if you imply it’s a study the magazine is simply reporting on. Especially since McCall’s isn’t an academic journal.  It’s a lifestyle magazine. But what does it matter? Nowhere does the magazine article say school principals received 13 times as many complaints about gay teachers as heterosexual ones.

No. Where.

But there is a statistic given which goes…

“Not surprisingly, complaints of heterosexual contact between teachers and students were nearly twice as frequent – 13 percent of our sample reported such complaints.”

That is the Only number 13 in the entire article.

But wait…there’s more…:

“In most cases, the principals reported the total number of complaints, with no indication of whether or not they had been investigated and found to be justified.”

And…

“Only 23 principals (2 percent) knew of instances in which teachers discussed their homosexuality in class.”

It just goes to show…

A…B…C… Always. Be. Checking.

Coffee is for checkers!

You have to fact check these people. Every time.

But per my last blog entry on the Hafer book, I have to wonder did he actually read that magazine article and choose to lie about it, or did he get his information second hand from Paul Cameron. Cameron is cited over and over again in his appendix (labelled “Notes”). I don’t think it’s a stretch to believe everything in that appendix is all Cameron, and Hafer is covering over some of it so it doesn’t look like he only used one source and it’s not the deep dive into the facts he wants you to think it is.