Opinion: Editor Of Anti-Gay Regnerus Study A Menace To LGBT Families And Community
James Wright is editor of the Elsevier journal Social Science Research. Because Wright allowed Mark Regnerus‘s booby-trapped anti-gay study with NOM-linked funding to be published through a corrupt process in violation of science publishing ethics, many leading scholars are calling for James Wright to be fired from Social Science Research.
It is true; given what Wright enabled with his illicit publication of the Regnerus study alone, he undermined the trust on which science is based.
And, Wright and Elsevier have sent a clear message to anti-scientific, radical anti-gay-rights factions, that they are for sale, and that it is possible to get pseudoscience that has been booby-trapped against LGBTers published through Wright with Elsevier.
WHY ELSEVIER AND WRIGHT ARE SUCH SERIOUS MENACES TO THE COMMUNITY
What makes Elsevier and James Wright such serious menaces to the LGBT community, is that Elsevier has assigned James Wright to be editor-in-chief of The International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2nd Edition.
If trust does not begin getting restored right now, if Elsevier refuses to commit to upholding at least bare minimum standards of science publishing ethics, then when that 2nd edition of the Elsevier Encyclopedia appears, it could very likely be stuffed absolutely full to bursting with hoax studies commissioned by anti-gay-rights organizations that know that with James Wright driving the Elsevier bus, profits are in the front seat and the bus is running clear over science publishing ethics, smashing science publishing ethics to smithereens.
We must keep in mind that National Organization for Marriage strategy documents released only through court order described plans for an “Expert Witness Project.”
Imagine how empowered NOM feels right now, having, so far, successfully pulled off the Regnerus hoax, and knowing that Elsevier and Wright are thrilled with how the hoax upped the Social Science Research journal’s “impact factor.”
It is essential to remember that NOM’s recent political losses in the United States have made its bigot leaders more determined than ever to spread ignorance-and-lies-based anti-gay hatred around the world, including to countries that promote murdering people only because they are gay. Â We must take a firm and unwavering stand against Elsevier and James Wright giving an unwarranted imprimatur of scientific respectability to anti-gay hatred and lies.
We have a worldwide human rights duty of conscience to stop James Wright and Elsevier from profiting from unseemly hate speech in the false disguise of a “study.”
Certain scholars not currently active in the drive to get the Regnerus study retracted nonetheless do not mince their words when speaking about it. For example, Dr. Judith Stacey says this:Â “I certainly agree that the review process at the journal was seriously flawed and that the article should not have been published.”
Wright’s violations of science publishing ethics are already copiously documented.
WRIGHT AND ELSEVIER ARE KNOWINGLY ABETTING REGNERUS IN HIS LYING TO THE PUBLIC
One very serious infraction will serve here as an example of what makes Elsevier and James Wright so dangerous to the community.
Regnerus was funded chiefly by the NOM-linked Witherspoon Institute.
In 2010, a study supposedly to be on gay parenting was organized by the Director of the Witherspoon Project for Marriage, Family and Democracy, W. Bradford Wilcox.
Wilcox recruited Regnerus to do the study. Witherspoon gave Regnerus a $55,000 planning grant. Wilcox and Regnerus then collaborated on the study design. Subsequently, Witherspoon approved the study design and arranged for Regnerus to have his full $785,000 in study funding.
Wilcox was extensively involved in the remainder of Regnerus’s study, and, he is on the editorial board of the journal that published Regnerus, Elsevier’s Social Science Research. Yet, no further details of Wilccox’s involvement in the study are necessary to making the present point.
In his published study, and then again in his more recent Additional Analyses, Regnerus makes the false claim that no study funding agency representatives were involved in his study design or in otherwise conducting his study.
Wright, Regnerus and Wilcox did not disclose Wilcox’s multiple conflicts of interest of their own free wills. Rather, investigations unearthed the documentation that Wright had published a lie from Regnerus involving Wright’s editorial board member Wilcox.
Moreover, Wilcox’s conflicts of interest with Regnerus’s funders do not stop with The Witherspoon Institute. Regnerus received $90,000 for the study from The Bradley Foundation, which contributes money to The Ridge Foundation, whose chief officer is Brad Wilcox. (On page 3 at this link, you may see the Bradley Foundation’s $20,000 grant to Wilcox’s Ridge Foundation).
In response to being exposed in these ways, Wilcox is attempting to deny his connection to the funders by saying that his title of Director of Witherspoon’s Program for Marriage, Family and Democracy was “honorific.”
That is fooling exactly nobody.
Sociologist Philip Cohen says this: “I find this description not credible. I do not think any reasonable auditor or ethical agency would subscribe to the idea that the “director†of an organization was not an “officer†of it.”
Sociologist Dr. Lori Hollyfield says this:
“For Wilcox to use the word “honorific” about his position of Witherspoon Program Director, and Regnerus study design collaborator, is a veiled attempt to turn back the clock. But the damage is done, and the credibility of this study is absolutely, indisputably undone. That Wilcox was a study designer, and that was not disclosed, is alone enough to justify retraction. The further possibility that he was a peer reviewer just adds weight to the case for retraction.”
“It is especially unacceptable that the conflict of interests were hidden, and that there is an ongoing attempt to deceive the public about them. It adds insult to that injury, that what was produced was a methodologically invalid study that perpetuates negative social stereotypes. This is a very malevolent situation; something must be done about it.” (Bolding added).
Elsevier officials and James Wright have been shown the documentation that Wilcox was a Witherspoon Program Director and that in that capacity, he recruited Regnerus to do Witherspoon’s study on gay parents, and then collaborated with Regnerus on the study design before Witherspoon approved Regnerus for full study funding.
Instead of correcting Regnerus’s lie, Elsevier and James Wright knowingly repeated the lie in publication.
Witherspoon, caught out lying on its stand-alone website for the Regnerus study, scrubbed incriminating evidence from their site, though we already had screenshots of that incriminating evidence.
People sponsoring, carrying out and publishing honest work do not have to lie in these ways.
In telling the public the lie that Regnerus’s funders were not involved in designing or conducting his study, Witherspoon and Regnerus are deliberately attempting to mislead the public into believing that Regnerus carried out his study independently of his funders and their anti-gay-rights political goals for the study.
Yet, Elsevier and James Wright have upon their shoulders an even heavier weight of accountability for disseminating that lie to the public, as they, not Regnerus, make the decisions of whether to publish.
With their planned, upcoming 2nd edition of Elsevier’s International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Elsevier and James Wright are capable of foisting any number of booby-trapped anti-LGBT “studies” off into the world.
Both Elsevier and James Wright must be counted as very serious menaces.
Sir William Timothy Gowers, British mathematician, is a Royal Society Research Professor at the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics at Cambridge University. He is the leader of a boycott against Elsevier. Gowers has said:  “a piece of blatant anti-gay propaganda has been published in the otherwise respectable journal Social Science Research. The research was, it appears, indirectly funded by anti-gay campaigners and is now being gleefully used to help Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign. The refereeing process seems to have been accelerated as well. Most importantly, the paper is bunkum and shouldn’t have been accepted: its conclusion (that children do worse if they have gay parents) is not remotely justified by the data used. So who publishes the journal Social Science Research and is not interested in investigating whether proper academic standards have been upheld? I surely don’t need to spell it out.” (Bolding added).
It is far past time for Elsevier to start behaving responsibly and to restore the trust that was shattered with the corrupted publication of the Regnerus submission. The Regnerus study must be retracted from publication, and James Wright must be fired from Elsevier, if the trust on which science is based is to begin to be restored.
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.
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Donald Trump over the weekend repeatedly said he wants to use the U.S. military against Americans who oppose him, called his critics “the enemy from within,” and declared they are more dangerous than America’s greatest foreign adversaries, including Russia, China, and North Korea.
“I always say we have the outside enemy, so you can say China, you can say Russia, you can say, Kim Jung-Un,” Trump told supporters at an Aurora, Colorado rally on Friday (video below). But, he added: “It’s the enemy from within, all the scum that we have to deal with. that hate our country. That’s a bigger enemy than China and Russia,” he said as the audience cheered.
On Sunday, Trump told Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo of his desire to use armed forces against Americans on Election Day.
“I think the bigger problem are the people from within, we have some very bad people, we have some sick people, radical left lunatics. And I think they’re the — and it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary by the military.”
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Pointing to those remarks, constitutional law scholar Laurence Tribe says, “Just think what this means for the 2028 election if Trump & Vance are in control as of January 20, 2025.”
In both events Trump had been talking about undocumented immigrants before switching his target to American citizens.
AFP called his remarks against U.S. citizens a “sinister election-related threat.” Rolling Stone called it a “a fascist plan to deploy military forces against U.S. citizens who oppose him on election day.” HuffPost described his remarks as “echoing similar language used by Nazis,” and HuffPost legal/justice reporter Brandi Buchman warned the “level of danger that people face if he is ever allowed near office again cannot be understated.” The New Republic declared Trump went “Full Dictator.”
“Trump as President and Commander in Chief would seek to wage war on the American people,” warned historian and professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert on fascism and authoritarianism. She adds, “our armed forces could have a new authoritarian role: domestic repression. ‘Handling’ the Leader’s enemies=violence.”
Attorney and former federal and state prosecutor Eric Lisann responded, writing: “Trump has already requested military equipment and protection for him now, as a mere candidate. He will gut the military of its finest leaders, many of whom have identified the historic threat he poses to the country, and turn it into his personal guard.”
The popular historian and professor Heather Cox Richardson called Trump’s attack on his political opponents, “the full leap to authoritarianism.”
“Trump’s full-throated embrace of Nazi ‘race science’ and fascism is deadly dangerous,” she added, noting his “campaign seems to be deliberately pushing the comparisons to historic American fascism by announcing that Trump will hold a rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden on October 27, an echo of a February 1939 rally held there by American Nazis in honor of President George Washington’s birthday.”
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And historian Steven A. Woodbridge wrote: “Pointing to the ‘enemy within’ is a classic strategy used by those with authoritarian tendencies many times in the past & it would appear nothing has changed. This man is a clear threat to democracy.”
Journalist Ahmed Baba warned, “Trump’s rhetoric is growing more violently authoritarian. His migrant fear-mongering is increasingly racist and now he’s once again saying he’ll deploy the military against people he disagrees with. Trump’s insane authoritarianism is the most important story of this election.”
Watch the videos below or at this link:
Trump: It is the enemy from within, all the scum that we have to deal with.. that’s a bigger enemy than China and Russia pic.twitter.com/wXByc2Xl6a
— Acyn (@Acyn) October 11, 2024
Trump to Bartiromo on what worries him about election day: “I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within … sick people, radical left lunatics. And it should be easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.” pic.twitter.com/twRsilNJnz
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 13, 2024
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General Mark Milley, one of then-President Donald Trump’s top generals who served as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says the Republican presidential nominee is “fascist to the core” and there is no one in America who has ever posed more of a threat to the nation.
Milley, appointed by Trump in 2019, served as the highest-ranking officer in the U.S. Armed Forces until his retirement last year. His remarks appear in Watergate journalist Bob Woodward’s latest book, “War,” The Independent reports.
After the January 6, 2021 insurrection, Gen. Milley requested a meeting with incoming Attorney General Merrick Garland, “to urge him to investigate domestic violent extremism and far-right militia movements.”
“According to Woodward, a senior Department of Justice lawyer said at the time that Milley’s sit-down with Garland might have been the first-ever meeting between a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the country’s top civilian law enforcement official. He writes that the general asked for the meeting because he was ‘deeply convinced’ that Trump remained ‘a danger to the country’ even though he had been forced from office after Biden’s election win.
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Later, in March of 2023, Milley spoke directly to Woodward, telling him that “no one has ever been as dangerous to this country” as the former president.
Milley had talked to Woodward about Trump for a previous book, “Peril,” but apparently his concerns had grown stronger since then.
“Do you realize, do you see what this man is?” Milley asked the veteran journalist. “He is the most dangerous person ever. I had suspicions when I talked to you about his mental decline and so forth, but now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is now the most dangerous person to this country.”
“A fascist to the core,” the General declared.
The Guardian adds that Milley “fears being recalled to uniform and court-martialed should Trump defeat Kamala Harris next month and return to power.”
“He is a walking, talking advertisement of what he’s going to try to do,” Milley recently “warned former colleagues,” Woodward writes. “He’s saying it and it’s not just him, it’s the people around him.”
Former top Trump adviser Steve Bannon, according to Woodward, has vowed to hold Milley “accountable.”
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In 2021, Woodward’s book “Peril” revealed Milley acted to ensure Trump could not misuse the nation’s nuclear arsenal.
“Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley took steps to prevent then-President Donald Trump from misusing the country’s nuclear arsenal during the last month of his presidency, according to a new book by The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Robert Costa obtained by NBC News,” the news organization had reported.
The book “recounted a phone conversation Milley had with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi after the Jan. 6 violence at the Capitol, which Pelosi blamed on an ‘unhinged’ Trump. Pelosi said in January that she spoke to Milley about ‘preventing an unstable president from initiating military hostilities or accessing the launch codes and ordering a nuclear strike.'”
“‘I can guarantee you, you can take it to the bank, that there’ll be, that the nuclear triggers are secure and we’re not going to do — we’re not going to allow anything crazy, illegal, immoral or unethical to happen,’ Milley told her, according to a transcript of the call obtained by the authors.”
“The president alone can order the use of nuclear weapons. But he doesn’t make the decision alone. One person can order it, several people have to launch it.”
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Billionaire Elon Musk, the world’s richest man who purchased the social media platform Twitter and renamed it X, is “all in” on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, The New York Times reports. X has “reportedly worked with Donald Trump’s campaign to censor material that could be harmful to the former president’s White House chances as part of a pattern of election interference that is unprecedented in U.S. history,” according to The Daily Beast.
Musk, The Times reports, “seen over the weekend jumping for joy alongside former President Donald J. Trump at a rally in Butler, Pa., is now talking to the Republican candidate multiple times a week.”
Video (below) shows Musk wore a black “Make America Great Again” cap with the words “Never Surrender” embroidered on the side and praising the ex-president’s actions during the attempted assassination.
The relationship between Musk and Trump “has proved significant in other ways. After a reporter’s publication of hacked Trump campaign information last month, the campaign connected with X to prevent the circulation of links to the material on the platform, according to two people with knowledge of the events. X eventually blocked links to the material and suspended the reporter’s account.”
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The reporter, Ken Klippenstein, whose work often focuses on national security issues, published the document because “it’s of keen public interest in an election season.”
Klippenstein last month called his ban “political,” and wrote: “It’s been widely reported that my suspension from X (Twitter) is only temporary. Those reports are false. My ban from X, the company says, is permanent.”
The New York Times’ Aric Toler writes: “Trump’s campaign worked with Musk/Twitter to implement a blanket ban on sharing the link to the Vance dossier.” NBC News’ Kevin Collier adds, “Per NYT, X’s crackdown on Ken Klippenstein and the Iran-hacked Vance doc came after the Trump campaign reached out. Well within each party’s right, but this is the exact same thing Musk, Trump, and the right threw a yearslong fit about over Hunter Biden.”
Journalist Steve Mullis notes, “It’s crazy that this is a single paragraph in the NYT’s Elon Musk story. Given that there were congressional hearings accusing Biden and Democrats of doing this sort of thing, this should be its own huge story.”
Musk, The Times adds, “has effectively moved his base of operations to Pennsylvania, the place that he has recently told confidants he believes is the linchpin to Mr. Trump’s re-election,” and “relentlessly promoted Mr. Trump’s candidacy to his 201 million followers on X, the social platform formerly known as Twitter that he bought for $44 billion and has used to spread conspiracy theories about the Democratic Party and to insult its candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris.”
The Times’ article ends with this: “Online, Mr. Musk has painted a dark picture of what would happen if Mr. Trump lost, a circumstance that could hurt Mr. Musk personally. In an interview with the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, he acknowledged ‘trashing Kamala nonstop’ and being all in for Mr. Trump.”
“If Mr. Trump loses, he joked, ‘how long do you think my prison sentence is going to be?'”
Democratic strategist Matt McDermott writes, “Doesn’t seem to be enough appreciation for the fact that it’s entirely reasonable to assume that Elon Musk is going all in on Trump because he’s worried about a federal probe into corporate corruption + election interference and knows Trump will shut down an investigation.”
The Times notes that Musk “is personally steering the actions of a super PAC that he has funded with tens of millions of dollars to turn out the vote for Mr. Trump, not just in Pennsylvania but across the country. He has even proposed taking a campaign bus tour across Pennsylvania and knocking on doors himself, in part to see how his money is being used.”
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The Times does not include news from August related to Musk’s super PAC, America PAC.
Attorney Jay Kuo alleged on Substack, “Elon Musk’s PAC Is Harvesting Voter Data.”
“The America PAC is using fraudulent techniques to obtain highly personal information from voters in swing states,” Kuo wrote, pointing to a CNBC “explosive report on how Elon Musk’s America PAC is defrauding voters through online ads. As the report explained, Musk’s Trump-aligned PAC is running a scheme that pretends to register people to vote. But in many cases, the PAC simply collects higher personal information from users that it can later use to retarget them.”
According to The Washington Post, some of Musk’s foreign backers in his $44 billion purchase of Twitter include Billionaire investor Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal al Saud ($2 billion) and The Qatar Investment Authority ($375 million). Buzzfeed News in 2022 referred to them as “countries that have historically restricted freedom of speech.”
Watch the video below or at this link.
“What’s even more telling is that America PAC only collects this personal information from users residing in swing states, such as Michigan, Wisconsin and North Carolina. For anyone else, it actually does assist them with registering to vote,” Kuo wrote. “It’s possible that America PAC simply ‘messed up’ badly by forgetting to actually redirect users in swing states to voter registration sites after scraping their personal information. In so doing, however, it has made it abundantly clear that it treats swing state users very differently than non-swing state ones. In exposing its own operations this way, it has raised a more troubling question: Is Musk involved in improper data harvesting and planning to improperly influence the election, just like we saw in 2016?”
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