TWO reader Scott Rose discovered an interesting tidbit: The editor of the journal Social Science Research, which published University of Texas researcher Mark Regnerus’ controversial gay parenting hack study, may also be a member of good standing with Team Fundie.
When James D. Wright is not publishing garbage in his “journal,” he pens books like “Covenant Marriage.” For the unfamiliar, these are unions promoted by fundies that make it extremely difficult to get a divorce — even if the spouses are no good together and completely miserable. If this latest discovery does not smell of bias I’m not sure what does.
Let’s put this all in perspective: The study was conducted by Mark Regnerus, a researcher whose tagline is, “liberty run amok can create extraordinary personal disaster.” His work was funded by Witherspoon and Bradley foundations, both of which are intimately affiliated with National Organization for Marriage and Family Research Council founder Robert George. And it was published in a journal whose editor authored the book “Covenant Marriage.”
Was there a snowball’s chance in hell that this study would have even one positive thing to say about gay parents?
UPDATE: A study by Wright talked about “the threat of gay marriage as a potentially destructive influence on the institution of marriage.” http://www.muskingum.edu/~bking/2010westcoast/Attitudes_Toward_Gay_Marriage.pdf. More proof that this was an agenda-driven hack job.
On another note, Nathaniel Frank, a visiting scholar at Columbia’s Center for Gender and Sexuality Law, wrote an excellent piece on the gay parenting quack study. Here are a couple of excerpts from the Los Angeles Times:
A study released this week suggests that, contrary to what years of academic research has said, children of gay parents actually fare worse than others….Mark Regnerus says that his study shows stark differences between such children and those with gay parents: the latter are more likely to be unemployed, consider suicide, use drugs, have an STD and fall victim to sexual abuse.
The trouble is, this is not what Regnerus’ study shows. Not by a long shot. And the claims he makes play into a long-standing pattern of conservative scholars and activists misinterpreting the data on LGBT families.
While Regnerus critiques “same-sex couples” raising kids, his study does not actually compare children raised by same-sex couples with those raised by different-sex couples. The criterion it uses is whether a parent “ever ha[d] a romantic relationship with someone of the same sex.” In fact, only a small proportion of its sample spent more than a few years living in a household headed by a same-sex couple…Indeed, the study acknowledges that what it’s really comparing with heterosexual families is not families headed by a same-sex couple but households in which parents broke up…Regnerus is concluding that when families endure a shattering separation, it is likely to shatter the lives of those in them. And this is news?
The trouble is that no scholarly research, including the Regnerus paper, has ever compared children of stable same-sex couples to children of stable different-sex couples, in part because an adequate sample size is hard to come by. (Regnerus acknowledges he was unable to find an adequate sample size, but he went ahead and made the comparison anyway.)
Frank also makes an excellent point on the double standard faced by LGBT parents:
There is a larger point, however, that can be lost in the debate over how to read the data. There is no basis in the recent history of American social policy for testing the parenting skills of a class of citizens before we grant them permission to parent — or to marry. Given all the research on the hardships of children raised by single parents, there is still no movement to preemptively remove kids from broken homes after every divorce or to ban single people from having kids; such policies would be patently inhumane and unenforceable. Growing up in poverty increases the risk of a wide range of social and psychological ills, yet since the craze for eugenics died down, no one is proposing banning poor people from marriage or child rearing. And some ethnic and racial groups are statistically less likely to get or stay married, yet there is no ethnic litmus test for marriage or parenting — only a gay one.
Clearly, this study is a right wing hack job. University of Texas should dismiss Regnerus for academic fraud. Far from a researcher, he has a political agenda and is working hand-in-hand with other like-minded agenda-driven “academics” like J. Wright.
I’ve asked several times: is there any way to files and ethics complaint?
I firmly believe, as I’ve stated on BTB, that this is nothing more than a devised tool to use in the upcoming elections.
Wayne Besen: Now update that new post, to reflect a study by Wright and some co-authors in which they talked about “the threat of gay marriage as a potentially destructive influence on the institution of marriage.” Wright has yet to let me know who the “referees” were for Regnerus’s and Marks’s “studies”. http://www.muskingum.edu/~bking/2010westcoast/Attitudes_Toward_Gay_Marriage.pdf
Obviously, the study should be used to support the idea that loving gay families deserve the same legal protections as those who choose the heterosexual lifestyle. We need to take this study and use it for our side, because it supports our side.
Thanks for uncovering more of this chicanery. There must be ways to file complaints against unethical behavior by sociologists and by editors of scholarly journals. The University of Texas and University of Central Florida may also have procedures to file complaints of unethical scholarly behavior. But I suspect the most effect place to complain would be to a professional organization of sociologists.
mollie judith olgin and mary christine chapa
two lesbians were shot in texas. okay, so why shouldn’t they have been shot? i’m sure that the one who died was put out of the misery that reeked of gender-disorientation, and i hope the one who didn’t die realizes the injustice she is committing against herself with the self-compromise that is always the mark of homosexuality. i think a line from my screenplay puts that self-compromise best, “How can you expect to be man enough to satisfy my hunger for a man…or anyone else’s hunger, for that matter…if YOU hunger”.
to put the err of homosexuality in another way, “if you’re not man enough to be your man, good luck filling anyone else’s void”.
back to mollie and mary. now, with females being of the lesser gender, monthly egg-leaks and booby milk-leaks not withstanding, one might think that it’s okay for a woman not to be all the woman she needs if women are not meant to be strong. getting right down to it, the egg-leak and milk-leaks alone tell us that females are tools to be used by men for egg-fertilization and by babies for nourishment. so, given that women were meant to be used as tools, it’s still a fallacy to say that it’s okay for the weaker gender to be gay. it’s a fallacy because it doesn’t take manly physical strength to be true to oneself. all it takes is a little self-love and self-devotion to feel compromised by the notion of homosexuality, all it takes is for one to take their own gender seriously. taking another line from one of my screenplays online at http://www.anti-gay.com, i will state that the line was written BEFORE chastity bono’s gender-dysfunction led her to a sex-change operation: “It works for you, huh, treating your gender like its presence on your body is some big mistake?”
mollie judith olgin and mary christine chapa were unabashed lesbians. lesbians are females whose own gender-disorientation leads them to feel a pressing curiosity of the female gender. now, we are all born with no knowledge of anything, we are all born disoriented and “in the dark” about everything, and if olgin and chapa were still in grade-school then i could probably dismiss their gender-naivete with the words “it will pass”. these little feminivoids were not in grade-school, they were almost in their 20s and they were still clueless enough about femininity to treat the female body as a “discovery zone” and spend hours and hours playing with it like it was bought at some kind of curiosity-shop.
that is what the word GENDERIVOID means. one can be a masculivoid or a feminivoid, but a genderivoid is one who is cluelessly curious about either gender. this curiosity (or lack of real gender-knowledge) comes about from a lack of gender-identity, which comes about through experience living and not through an inexplicable “born this way” panacea. desire for another person can’t come into existence without reason, nobody actively wants anything for no reason. if two gay “men” say that they are only inspecting each others’ bodies for something to do, what’s stopping them from inspecting females? a lack of curiosity is stopping them from inspecting females, that’s what’s stopping them. why inspect her gadget if it doesn’t satisfy the curiosity of gay “men”?
mollie judith olgin and mary christine chapa were naive genderivoids to be using homosexuality as a crutch for their gender-dysfunctions and gender-curiosities. now, i understand the need for sexual gratification, but unless one gets their homosexual gratification with porn and masturbation, there is an element of self-compromise involved in being gay with another person. i guess the army got rid of their “be all that you can be” slogan once they started recruiting fags – “be all that you can be” is offensive to gays because it brings to mind the words “be all the man you need”. and that much self-respect is regarded by gays as HATE.
don henley had an lp in 1985 called “building the perfect beast,” dr. frank-n-furter marveled at brad majors and called him “such a perfect specimen of manhood,” yet i’m sure gays (who shout about their self-love to anyone who is apt to believe them) would regard as pathetic or conceited or not based in reality, any man building himself up to be his own “perfect specimen of manhood”. still, that is the cure for homosexuality, just a sense of self and a sense of self-respect and a sense of self-devotion.
dylan terreri, i
po box 2613
cranberry twp 16066
http://www.anti-gay.com
“When I’m hungry, I eat. When I’m thirsty, I drink. When I feel like saying something, I say it.” – Madonna
http://www.jaggedlittledyl.com/essays
Dylan:
What you wrote is not funny. You’re a real piece of human garbage and I’m sure not one tenth the “man” you fancy yourself to be. You are obviously a sicko with severe hang ups and acute sexual dysfunction.
Wayne, at give him SOME points for being creatively stupid. It’s like an Escher drawing of a homophobe’s brain.
Track dylan’s IP address. If he lives in the area, call the cops.
Someone’s been thinking about this a lot.
Not so much thinking, but definitely a lot.
Dylan,
Take your meds, please.