Mark Regnerus Attacks New Study on Children of Gays - Is He Out for Career Suicide?

With the Christofascists and their paid whores - both in the realm of politics and faux experts - who make sex workers look forthright and virtuous in comparison, objective facts simply do not matter.   It is all about trying to maintain an increasingly discredited ideology without which the Christofascists seemingly would go into psychological melt down.  Just as some of the most untethered from reality far right evangelicals are in denial that they are losing the war against same sex marriage, so too some of the faux experts favored by the Christofascists are so obsessed with supporting the anti-gay evangelical agenda that they seem to be willing to destroy what's left of their already careers.  A case in point?  Mark Regnerus who, after a lambasting in the Michigan gay marriage ban lawsuit, seems heel bent to become little more than a quack relegated to securing a position at some small extreme Christian college.  As noted before, one has to wonder how long it will be before the Universality of Texas finds an excuse to remove Regnerus from the faculty.  A piece in Slate looks at Regnerus' latest insanity.  Here are highlights:

You might think that a researcher who was repudiated by his own department, caught lying about the role of funding in his research, and generally made the laughing stock of serious scholars in his field would lay low for a while. If this researcher had any desire to rehabilitate his career, you might assume, he would avoid repeating the same line of ungrounded, politicized, and harmful claims about LGBTQ families that badly marred his career in the first place.

But if you were speaking of Mark Regnerus, you’d be wrong. A young, conservative Catholic professor at the University of Texas at Austin, Regnerus gained renown in recent years for getting through peer review a fundamentally flawed study that claimed children of same-sex parents fared poorly, when the study didn’t even examine, well, children of same-sex parents. Numerous investigators from within and outside academia showed definitively that the study—from conception to design to funding to execution and roll-out—was a conservative PR campaign meant to influence court cases to block same-sex marriage by denigrating LGBTQ families with false claims about child outcomes. And all of this with no regard for the stigmatizing impact on those families, particularly children, in whose names conservatives have famously waged their anti-modernist campaigns.

In the wake of yet another study showing the kids are all right, Regnerus has again taken up his pen, this time trying to skewer the latest data by hurling at them the same criticisms that discredited his own study. Yet the facts are simple, and they’re not remotely on his side. 

[O]f the 15,000 people Regnerus screened, only 248 even had one parent who had had a same-sex relationship, and of those, only two were actually raised for any significant period of time by a stable same-sex couple.  

Regnerus’ sample size was two. Two children with same-sex parents. Which gives new meaning to the phrase, “unusual sample size.”

By contrast, the Crouch study that Regnerus condemns looked at 500 children with a gay parent, more than twice as many as Regnerus found. And even though they were not all in stable, two-parent homes, the children fared better on several measures.

It’s no surprise that a federal judge in Michigan earlier this year dismissed Regnerus’ testimony against same-sex marriage as a farce, saying: “The Court finds Regnerus’s testimony entirely unbelievable and not worthy of serious consideration.” Hopefully the rest of the world will follow suit.

Again I ask the question: when is the University of Texas going to send Regnerus packing?  His very presence combined with more batshitery is only harming the university's reputation.