Innocent of Academic Misconduct?
On September 7, 2012, the Ruth Institute published a press release praising the University of Texas for halting further investigation into whether UT Sociology Associate Professor Mark Regnerus’s “New Family Structures Study” on same-sex parenting was guilty of “scientific misconduct.”
You See What You Look For
The press release cited the study as evidence that children raised by same-sex parents are more likely to be molested and identified as gay. The most explosive results in the paper can be found in Table 2: Young adults whose mothers had a same sex relationship in their childhoods were more likely to have had sex against their will, and have been touched sexually by an adult and less likely to describe themselves as exclusively heterosexual than children raised by their married biological parents.
According to Regnerus’s findings, children raised by homosexual parents are more likely to suffer from poor impulse control, depression and suicidal thoughts, require mental health therapy, identify themselves as homosexual, choose cohabitation, be unfaithful to partners, contract sexually transmitted diseases, be sexually molested, have lower income levels, drink excessively, and smoke tobacco and marijuana.
This interpretation of the study lines up perfectly with the creed of The National Organization for Marriage’s belief that marriage is only for heterosexuals and further advances their agenda, in their eyes anyway.
All Those Opposed Say Nay
The study has been under attack every since it was released on June 10th in the peer-reviewed Journal of Social Science Research. It has been called “flawed, misleading and scientifically unsound” by GLAAD, Human Rights Campaign, The Family Equality Council and Freedom to Marry. A gay-activist blogger Scott Rosensweig accused Regnerus of “academic fraud” and called for an investigation last July. However, this pre-investigation did not yield scientific misconduct. The office of the Vice President for Research concluded in a report on August 24th that there was insufficient evidence to warrant an investigation and shutdown of the project. This November, an audit is scheduled to appear in the November issue of Journal Science Research. In this audit, Darran E. Sherkat, a Sociology Professor at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, who assessed the study, writes that the peer-review system failed because of “both ideology and inattention.” He also called it “b……t.”
Sherkat had access to all the correspondence and reviews that went into the study and was told the identities of the reviewers. According to Sherkat’s evaluation, three of the six reviewers are on record as opposing same-sex marriage. Some reviewers had a connection to Regnerus. The majority of the respondents were from failed heterosexual marriages or single-parent homes, responsible for stress on the children. Other problems? Even if a mother had a brief relationship with another lesbian and did not raise a child together, they were classified as a lesbian parent. In fact, it turned out that most of the adults that the study considered products of gay or lesbian parents were not, for the most part, raised by gays or lesbians.
What Was Asked of the Respondents
The study, of 15,000 adults between the ages of eighteen and thirty-nine, turned on this question:
S7. From when you were born until age 18 (or until you left home to be your own), did either of our parents ever have a romantic relationship with someone of the same sex?
A yes – even a single romantic relationship put the person in the category of gay or lesbian parent, and excluded them from the category of intact biological families, regardless of their actual living situations.
Most of the adults in this survey were not raised by gays or lesbians: Two hundred and fifty-three people said “yes” to question S7. A hundred and seventy-five said that their mother had had a relationship of some kind. Only forty-two percent reported living with a “gay father” and his partner for at least four months – and less than two percent for as long as three years.
While not perfect, this large national survey provides, some claim, the most representative picture to date of young adults, kids of same-sex couples. Prior studies mostly looked at small, non-representative “convenience samples.”
Conclusion of “New Family Structures Study?”
The Conservatives believe that the study emphatically proves that homosexuals should not be parents, the position of the National Organization for Marriage. Gay advocacy groups feel that group outcomes data shouldn’t determine basic rights and that this study is an attempt to undermine their same-sex rights.
