Anti-Gay Christofascists Find a New "Expert" on Gay Parenting

For a group of people who claim to worship the Bible - including supposedly the Ten Commandments - and wear their feigned religiosity on their sleeves, no one seemingly lies more often or trots out more utterly bogus "experts" to bolster their hate-filled views than the Christofascists.  Indeed, I often remark that with these peoples' lips are moving, the safest assumption is to believe that they are lying.  You will likely be right 99.9% of the time.  Now, after Mark Regnerus was discredited by many experts and called a fraud by a federal judge, the Christofacscist have found another false expert willing to disseminate lies and bogus research on gay parenting.   This latest faux expert is Donald Paul Sullins, a Catholic priest, who has put out anti-LGBT pieces on a pay to publish website.  Like Regnerus, Sullins is a fraud and his research is bogus.  A piece in Slate looks at this latest unscrupulous attack on LGBT parents.  Here are excerpts:

The religious right is at it again. Despite the Supreme Court having settled the question of whether same-sex couples can marry and, by extension, raise families, we continue to see research studies popping up that claim to find correlations between having same-sex parents and suffering from a variety of ailments including depression, anxiety, suicidality, problems with intimacy, and even risk of parental abuse.

The latest is from Catholic University scholar Donald Paul Sullins, a Catholic priest who already has under his belt several studies that make related claims. Sullins’ most recent study was published in an Egyptian-based open access journal that requires authors to pay for publication, creating a conflict of interest since publishers who ought to perform quality control have a financial incentive to accept papers, regardless of quality. The journal’s publisher has been criticized for a lax peer-review process that isn't even overseen by a real editor.

It’s not hard to see why someone like Sullins would turn to a subpar journal to get his paper accepted. For years now, religious and social conservatives have made claims, citing research, that children are harmed by having gay, lesbian, or bisexual parents. The familiar network of anti-LGBTQ behemoths, including the Family Research Council, American Family Association, and several other groups, then spread those claims across the internet, breathlessly asserting they had proof that children need a mom and a dad to thrive and that it’s both immoral and bad public policy to allow gay people to parent—or marry. In [Sullin's study] it, he claims “adults raised by same-sex parents were at over twice the risk of depression” developing later in life as those raised by different-sex couples. He calls it the “first study to examine children raised by same-sex parents into early adulthood” and claims it “contribute[s] new information for understanding of the effects of same-sex parenting through the life-course transition into early adulthood.”

Except, as with the other studies making similar claims, it does no such thing. Sullins found 20 cases of what he calls “adolescents with same-sex parents.” Yet we know nothing about how long these subjects lived with a same-sex couple, much less whether they were “raised” by one. . . . . Sullins thus has no grounds on which to define his subjects as having been “raised” by “same-sex parents,” which would be essential for his entire anti-LGBTQ claim to make any sense.

Indeed, one wonders why this small group of anti-LGBTQ articles published since 2012 is even considered research. Each author is a highly religious man who has made it abundantly clear that his work is driven by his religious faith.

Because their transparent efforts to commandeer an entire social science field to advance a religious agenda makes their scientific claims—and them—into laughing stocks. One thing we can thank God for is the federal court system, which forced them to admit that leaps of faith, not good science, were driving their conclusions.

By contrast, the What We Know Project, which I run at Columbia Law School, has collected 74 peer-reviewed studies concluding that having a lesbian, gay, or bisexual parent causes no harm.

That debate has now been settled by the Supreme Court. There was something reprehensible about spending millions of dollars to try to hijack a scholarly discourse in an effort to advance an extremist religious ideology, especially by claiming to help kids while actually supporting policies that would deny them legal ties to their parents. Now that they have lost the battle, the fact that these social conservatives continue to gratuitously berate LGBTQ families is simply unconscionable.