Authors of Disreputable Anti-Gay Studies Triggered Growing Numbers of Critics, Rapidly Widening Scandal

Mark Regnerus, a professor at University of Texas, Austin and Loren Marks, a professor at Louisiana State University, authors of disreputable studies about gays have attracted growing numbers of critics in an apparent growing scandal

 

Reports on twinned studies now being used as anti-gay-rights weapons in the 2012 elections have to date focused mainly on 1) suspect work funded through NOM’s Robert George and 2) carried out by University of Texas, Austin’s Mark Regnerus.

Regnerus purported to compare young adult children of heterosexual parents with gay parents, yet for his study, did not even attempt to locate actual persons substantially raised by gay parents.

Previously, studies on children of gay parents showed good child outcomes.

The Regnerus and Marks papers appear to have been contrived as a one-two election year punch to demonize same-sex-headed families with children.

Regnerus claims the following in his study; previous conclusions that homosexual parents were not more dangerous — to children — than heterosexual parents — “must go” as a result of his study.  The aim and contorted conclusion of Loren Mark’s companion anti-gay-rights political propaganda, meanwhile — titled “Same-sex parenting and children’s outcomes” — is the discrediting of a 2005 American Psychological Association brief on gay parenting.

One tell-tale sign that the two papers were coordinated for use as anti-gay-rights political propaganda is that although they were published simultaneously in “Social Science Research” — whose editor James Wright has written demeaningly of gay people and their relationships — the Marks paper cites the Regnerus paper.  That is to say, before either of these two papers were published, Marks had information about the Regnerus study and used it as a reference work for his own anti-gay-rights paper. The appearance is strong that Regnerus and Marks were working in cahoots towards the simultaneous publication of their two articles, with an anti-gay-rights political aim in an election year.

In this context, it is of great note that Loren Marks, a Louisiana State University Associate Professor, earlier was disallowed from giving expert testimony in a Proposition 8-related case when, under questioning, he admitted he had cherry-picked information from studies he had not read, and that he knew nothing about same-sex couples.

Undeterred by that episode in which his scholarly fraudulence was exposed in a court of law, Marks made his current anti-gay-rights propaganda-research available to John Boehner-House Republicans’ DOMA-defending attorney Paul Clement, for use in a court brief filed on June 4, 2012 in the Karen Golinski case. Marks’s paper was cited in the court document before the paper was published. Marks’s study is used in that court brief to argue that previous decisions in the Golinski case relied on insufficient research about gay parenting. Never mind that Golinski is not about gay parenting; it is about equal rights to federal benefits for same-sex spouses. Golinski and her wife do not have children, but the Boehner-Clement axis believes that demonizing gay parents in a case not involving gay parents should determine the outcome of the case.

One of the most galling aspects of that brief, is that it argues against courts deciding DOMA cases, because, so Clement alleges, gay rights should be decided by voters, not by questions of constitutionality. Meanwhile, though, NOM’s Robert George, who arranged for the funding of the Regnerus hit job, is an author of the anti-gay NOM pledge, signed by Romney, which calls for a federal constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage throughout the country.

That is to say, Boehner is using LGBT-tax payers’ money to argue in court that gay Americans’ rights should not be decided on any constitutional basis, until the Constitution says that same-sex marriage is forbidden throughout the country.

Meanwhile, known Robert George political allies are using both the Marks and Regnerus studies to poison voters’ minds against gay people. The Witherspoon Institute, through which George arranged much of Regnerus’s funding, has published, among other anti-gay-attack articles The Kids Aren’t Alright  and Supreme Court Take Notice; Two Sociologists Shift the Ground of the Gay Marriage Debate.  That latter article by Matthew J. Frank was cross-referenced by Frank in another post he made about the studies on The National Review site, Sociology, Same-Sex Marriage, and the Courts. The National Review is a long-time home to NOM’s lying anti-gay bigot Maggie Gallagher, who has been touting the studies with evident anti-gay-rights political aims in varied publications including TNR’s site. Here, Gallagher made a post, reporting on a panel of “sociologists” voicing support for the Regnerus study. What Gallagher the anti-gay propagandist did not make explicit in her post is that those supportive of Regnerus’s anti-gay aims are all affiliated with the Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion, and that Regnerus himself is affiliated with Baylor. Robert George’s and Maggie Gallagher’s long-time anti-gay-rights collaborator Ed Whelan published on TNR’s website a three-part installment of posts trumpeting the corrupt Regnerus and Marks studies and bashing same-sex-headed households.

This reporter’s request from Loren Marks’s Louisiana State University for information regarding the funding of Marks’s study has yet to receive a definitive response.

New York City-based novelist and freelance writer Scott Rose’s LGBT-interest by-line has appeared on Advocate.com, PoliticusUSA.com, The New York Blade, Queerty.com, Girlfriends and in numerous additional venues. Among his other interests are the arts, boating and yachting, wine and food, travel, poker and dogs. His “Mr. David Cooper’s Happy Suicide” is about a New York City advertising executive assigned to a condom account.