University of Texas Opens Inquiry of Regnerus Gay Parenting Study

UPDATED:  I missed this article earlier:  200 Ph.D.s and M.D.s and professionals in sociology, psychiatry and other relevant fields have sent a letter to James Wright, editor of “Social Science Research,” the journal where Regnerus’s study was published with a companion piece by the known anti-gay bigot Loren Marks. Here's a sampling from the letter:

As researchers and scholars, many of whom with extensive experience in quantitative and qualitative research in family structures and child outcomes, we write to raise serious concerns about the most recent issue of Social Science Research and the set of papers focused on parenting by lesbians and gay men. In this regard, we have particular concern about Mark Regnerus’ paper entitled “How different are the adult children of parents who have same-sex relationships? Findings from the New Family Structures Study.”

While the presence of a vibrant and controversial public debate should in no way censor scholarship, it should compel the academy to hold scholarship around that topic to our most rigorous standards. We are very concerned that these standards were not upheld in this issue or with this paper, . . . .

In this letter, we detail the specific concerns that lead us to request that you publicly disclose the reasons for both the expedited peer review process of this clearly controversial paper and the choice of commentators invited to submit critiques. We further request that you invite scholars with specific expertise in LGBT parenting issues to submit a detailed critique of the paper and accompanying commentaries for publication in the next issue of the journal.

We question the process by which this paper was submitted, reviewed, and accepted for publication.

As I said, I hope that this is the beginning of the end of Regenerus' career.  Or at least in legitimate academia. *
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I have been very critical of the right wing funded and extremely flawed gay parenting "study" conducted by Mark Regnerus (pictured at right) of the University of Texas.  The study used very flawed samples for supposed children of gay parents and, in fact, had all the hallmarks of a Christianist propaganda piece aimed at maligning and denigrating gays and lesbians as parents.  The study has been condemned both by gay rights organizations and mental health organizations.  Now, faced with almost universal condemnation except from anti-gay hatr groups, the University of Texas has opened an investigation into Regenerus' study.  One can only hoe that the university will take appropriate disciplinary action against Regenerus who haw certainly harmed the university's reputation as a serious academic institution. Here are highlights from The New Civil Rights Movement:

Between January, 2011 and June of 2012, Mark Regnerus of the University of Texas, Austin, plotted, carried out and then had published a “study” of dubious scholarly merit, alleged to show, but not actually showing, that homosexual parents are dangerous to children.

Funding for the Regnerus study was arranged through the National Organization For Marriage‘s Robert P.George along with George’s anti-gay-rights colleagues at The Witherspoon Institute and the Bradley Foundation. George is an author of the anti-gay NOM pledge signed by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

This reporter mailed a Scientific Misconduct complaint about Regnerus to University of Texas President William Powers, Jr. on June 21.  On June 25, UTA Research Integrity Officer Dr. Robert Peterson told me in an e-mail that he will be conducting an inquiry as per university policy.  

“The purpose of the investigation is to: explore in detail the allegations; examine the evidence in depth; and, determine specifically whether misconduct has been committed, by whom, and to what extent. The investigation also will determine whether there are additional instances of possible misconduct that would justify broadening the scope beyond the initial allegations.”

The very name of the Regnerus’s project, “The New Family Structures Study,” is deceptive — and is an anti-gay bigot dog whistle — in ways characteristic of Regnerus’s funder NOM’s Robert George of the Witherspoon Institute and the Bradley Foundation.

Because of that, and for reasons elaborated below, this reporter insists that for its Scientific Misconduct inquiry of Regnerus, the University of Texas, Austin must examine in its investigation, and provide, copies of all written communications, and notes, such as of phone conversations, and all other documentation of the relationship between Mark Regnerus and The Witherspoon Institute from the time those two parties first considered a study about children of gay parents, to include the time that Witherspoon gave Regnerus a $35,000 “planning grant” and subsequent to when the plan had been formulated and Witherspoon approved Regnerus for his full study funding.

Regnerus’s claim that the probability-based web panel that he used is the best of all existing sampling methods for surveying gay fathers and lesbian mothers is false, totally and utterly false. For his sampling, Regnerus relied on the company Knowledge Networks to find his survey respondents through Knowledge Networks’ existing panelist system, which is based on a combination of random digit dialing sampling and address-based sampling.

To sum this point up; 1) Regnerus likely misleads when he asserts he compared young adult children of gay parents to young adult children of “intact biological families;” 2) In the study itself, and in his public promotions of the study, Regnerus likely misleads when he states that he would not by any means have been able to survey an adequate sampling of young gay adults substantially raised by gay parents up through the 1990s; and 3) Regnerus likely misleads when he states that he used the best existing survey method for surveying young adult children of gay parents.

Regnerus’s funder Robert George of the anti-gay National Organization for Marriage is obsessively concerned with “the legal boundaries of marriage.” Robert George has written a draft for a federal constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages throughout the nation. He does not like to see gay parenting study results with good child outcomes, as they are work against his known, ferocious anti-gay political goals. George’s aims in arranging for the funding of Regnerus’s study precisely match the concerns expressed in Regnerus’s introduction.

Regnerus has been promoting his study as evidence against expansion of legal recognition of gay couples’ relationships. In one of his Slate articles, Regnernus wrote that gay-rights “advocates would do well from here forward to avoid simply assuming the kids are all right,” and then, after barely paying lip service to the notion that marriage recognition could perhaps help children being raised by gay parents, he ends his article by saying that the New Family Structures Study  “may suggest that the household instability that the NFSS reveals is just too common among same-sex couples to take the social gamble of spending significant political and economic capital to esteem and support this new (but tiny) family form while Americans continue to flee the stable, two-parent biological married model, the far more common and accomplished workhorse of the American household, and still—according to the data, at least—the safest place for a kid.”

Robert George’s Witherspoon Institute – a Regnerus funder — has devoted a stand-alone site to the Regnerus and Marks studies – where the Regnerus Slate article with the aforementioned offending quote is at the top of the site’s list of study-related articles “From the Web.”

Again, a thorough investigation is needed and, if worse case suspicions are confirmed about the seemingly deliberately biased nature of Regenerus' study,  Regenerus ought to be dismissed from the University of Texas faculty.  From what I've seen to date, Regenerus is little better that the long discredited Paul Cameron who first decided the outcome he wanted and then manipulated the "study sample" to achieve the result he had preordained.