<div dir="ltr"><h1>In Michigan, Same-Sex Marriage Goes to Trial Today. Opponents Will Cite This Study. Too Bad It's Already Been Discredited.</h1>
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by <a href="http://www.newrepublic.com/authors/nora-caplan-bricker">Nora Caplan-Bricker</a> |
February 24, 2014 <i>The New Republic</i></h3>
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<div class="" itemprop="articleBody"><p>On Tuesday, when a
federal court in Michigan hears arguments about the state’s
constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, a single study will play an
outsize role. It's come to be known as the “Regnerus study”—after its
author, Mark Regnerus, a University of Texas sociologist. Opponents of
same-sex marriage say it's the best evidence yet that children raised by
gay parents suffer a disadvantage. Most experts take a different
view—like Darren Sherkat, the sociologist who was tasked with completing
a definitive review in 2012, they think “<a href="http://chronicle.com/blogs/percolator/controversial-gay-parenting-study-is-severely-flawed-journals-audit-finds/30255">It’s bullshit</a>." </p><p>The
study's formal title is “How Different Are the Adult Children of
Parents Who Have Same-Sex Relationships?”—and it set off a storm of
criticism almost immediately upon publication in 2012. <em>The New York Times</em>’ Erik Eckholm <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/23/us/opponents-of-same-sex-marriage-take-bad-for-children-argument-to-court.html?hp">summarized it neatly</a> on
Friday, but the story is worth revisiting here—primarily because, no
matter how many times and ways other scholars try to discredit the
study, it continues to shape policy in state legislatures and amicus
briefs. Michigan is only the latest example.</p><p>Regnerus interviewed
3,000 young adults, including 248 who reported that at least one parent
had engaged in a same-sex relationship. That group showed consistently
lower psychological and behavioral wellbeing, Regnerus <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0049089X12000610">said</a>.
And the largest gap, he reported, was “between the children of women
who have had a lesbian relationship and those with still-married
(heterosexual) biological parents.”</p><p>A large group of Regnerus’s peers were alarmed by his methodology. Some 200 of them <a href="http://familyinequality.wordpress.com/2012/06/29/200-researchers-respond-to-regnerus-paper/">signed a letter</a> expressing
"serious concerns about the scholarly merit of this paper." Among the
problems they cited: The study classifies as “lesbian mothers” and “gay
fathers” any people who have had same-sex relations since becoming
parents. More than half of the subjects who Regnerus holds up as victims
of same-sex parenting are, in fact, the products of heterosexual
marriages that fell apart—they are part of his dataset because a parent
later went on to have a same-sex partner, casual or otherwise. Regnerus
judges the effect of “same-sex relationships” by looking at subjects
who, for the most part, were not raised by a same-sex couple. </p><p>Many
experts concluded that Regnerus had merely documented the
well-established effects of broken families on kids—and nothing unique
to same-sex parenting. That was the essential conclusion of the American
Sociological Association, which has <a href="http://www.asanet.org/press/asa_files_amicus_brief_in_same-sex_marriage_cases.cfm">rejected the study’s findings</a> and
said publicly: “If any conclusion can be reached from Regnerus’s study,
it is that family stability is predictive of child well-being." </p><p>Critics
have also taken notice of the study's backstory, which would seem to
suggest a clear political agenda—by the groups who funded it, and
perhaps the scholar himself. As <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/23/us/opponents-of-same-sex-marriage-take-bad-for-children-argument-to-court.html?hp">Eckholm explains</a>, Regnerus was recruited and his work partially funded by the <a title="Website." href="http://winst.org/">Witherspoon Institute</a>,
a religious-conservative research center. He also recieved $90,000 from
the Bradley Foundation, which backs conservative causes.</p><p>In
addition, the University of Texas, where Regnerus works, hired an
academic consultant named W. Bradford Wilcox who was a fellow at
Witherspoon, and who had been in the institute’s employ when the idea
for the study came about. As Zack Ford at ThinkProgress has <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2013/03/11/1697801/documents-reveal-anti-gay-parenting-study-was-manipulated-to-influence-supreme-court/">reported</a>:
“Regnerus reached out to Wilcox back in September of 2010 for input
about ‘their hopes for what emerges from this project.’ Wilcox also
suggested the study be pitched to the journal <em>Social Science Research</em>, where Wilcox sits on the editorial advisory board.” At one point, the president of the Witherspoon Institute, Luis <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2013/03/11/1697801/documents-reveal-anti-gay-parenting-study-was-manipulated-to-influence-supreme-court/">Tellez, wrote directly to Regnerus</a> to
tell him, “It would be great to have this before major decisions of the
Supreme Court” (a.k.a. the DOMA and Proposition 8 decisions on same-sex
marriage). </p><p>After the study set off a media maelstrom, <em>Social Science Research</em> asked
Sherkat, a member of its editorial board, to perform an audit into
whether the journal had erred in publishing the study. His answer: yes.
As Tom Bartlett at <em>The Chronicle of Higher Education</em> <a href="http://chronicle.com/blogs/percolator/controversial-gay-parenting-study-is-severely-flawed-journals-audit-finds/30255">reported at the time</a>,
three of the study’s six peer-reviewers were on record opposing
same-sex marriage, and were “not without some connection to Regnerus,” <a href="http://chronicle.com/blogs/percolator/controversial-gay-parenting-study-is-severely-flawed-journals-audit-finds/30255">Sherkat wrote</a>. “Obviously, the reviewers did not do a good job.”</p>
<p>Regnerus,
for his part, has said he didn’t intend the study to serve as
conclusive evidence in the same-sex marriage fight. “Plenty of social
conservatives made more of it than it deserves, while many social
liberals went in the opposite direction, mindlessly denouncing it as
having nothing interesting to say at all,” he told <em>The Dallas Morning News</em> in a <a href="http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/sunday-commentary/20130614-mark-regnerus-defending-my-research-on-same-sex-parenting.ece">defense of his work in June</a>.
Asked if a parent’s short-term, casual same-sex relationship could be
relevant to how a child turned out, he replied that his dataset included
such scenarios because it “is billed as a general overview” and
“stability in such households was quite uncommon in the population at
large.” He added, “How relevant a parent’s same-sex relationship
experience is for a child’s upbringing is, of course, a viable empirical
question, but … not every good question has data to answer it yet.”</p><p>The denunciations of Regnerus’ work haven’t kept it from having influence. The study appeared in <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2013/02/05/1545021/mormons-and-evangelicals-to-scotus-ignore-preponderance-of-science-on-same-sex-parenting/">amicus briefs</a> during the <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2013/01/30/1515501/catholic-bishops-to-scotus-deny-marriage-equality-because-being-gay-is-just-conduct/">DOMA and Prop 8</a> cases
that went before the Supreme Court in 2013. According to the Human
Rights Campaign (HRC), which has tracked mentions of the study, it has
come up in legislative debates in <a href="http://www.regnerusfallout.org/the-impact#Hawaii">Hawaii</a>, <a href="http://www.regnerusfallout.org/the-impact#Illinois">Illinois</a>, <a href="http://www.regnerusfallout.org/the-impact#Colorado">Colorado</a>, <a href="http://www.regnerusfallout.org/the-impact#Maryland">Maryland</a>, <a href="http://www.regnerusfallout.org/the-impact#Minnesota">Minnesota</a>, <a href="http://www.regnerusfallout.org/the-impact#RhodeIsland">Rhode Island</a>, and the U.S. <a href="http://www.regnerusfallout.org/the-impact#Congress">Congress</a>.
Before Regnerus was scheduled to testify in Michigan, his study was
used as evidence in cases that went to court in Hawaii and New
Mexico. Regnerus' work has even influenced debates abroad—especially in
Russia, where Yelena Mizulina, the chairwoman of the Duma’s committee on
family, women and children, <a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/globalizing-homophobia-part-3-new-life-discredited-research">cited him </a>to argue for a law banning same-sex adoption, which was <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/13/world/europe/russia-same-sex-marriage-adoption-ban/">enacted this February</a>.</p>
<p>The lawmaker who introduced a bill to allow the state to remove children from gay parents, Alexei Zhuravlyov, also <a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/globalizing-homophobia-part-3-new-life-discredited-research">quoted</a> the study. (His bill was withdrawn before the Olympics, but could be reintroduced.)</p>
<p>HRC is currently <a href="http://www.hrc.org/blog/entry/judge-orders-disclosure-of-documents-detailing-publication-of-regnerus-junk">funding</a> a gay rights activist's lawsuit against the University of Central Florida, which houses <em>Social Science Research</em>,
seeking to obtain emails between editors and scholarly reviewers and
other documents that could further explain how the journal allowed the
study to go to print. But judging by the year and a half since
publication, Regnerus isn’t going away—no matter what new information
emerges.</p></div>
<p class="">Source URL: <a href="http://www.newrepublic.com//article/116741/regnerus-study-same-sex-marriage-michigan-must-defeat-bad-science">http://www.newrepublic.com//article/116741/regnerus-study-same-sex-marriage-michigan-must-defeat-bad-science</a></p>
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