The National Review as an Organ of Arrogant Bigotry

Robert VerBruggen writes for The National Review, which was founded by the white supremacist William F. Buckley, Jr.

National Review writers ofttimes still defend the publication’s apartheid roots.

VerBruggen, for his part, is a heterosupremacist who thinks that because anti-gay bigots do not want gay couples to get married, gay couples must not be allowed to marry. That echoes the National Review’s history of saying that because a privileged white majority wanted segregation, whites deserved to see racial apartheid continue. See here for more of VerBruggen’s gay-bashing bigotry.

One of VerBruggen’s co-contributors is the arch-anti-gay-bigot Maggie Gallagher of the so-called National Organization for Marriage, an anti-gay-rights group that sponsors hate rallies where NOM speakers yell through megaphones that homosexuals are “worthy to death.”

On July 12 in The National Review, Gallagher attacked me by lying that I have written that she has blood on her hands because she opposes “gay marriage.”

Gallagher’s NOM is behind the funding of a fraudulent study carried out by the University of Texas, Austin’s Mark Regnerus. Gallagher has been militantly active in smearing gay people in political contexts on the basis of Regnerus’s fraudulent study.

Understanding what makes Regnerus’s study a fraud is not complicated.

Regnerus alleged he wanted to study child outcomes for gay parents. Regnerus’s “test” group in his “test-and-control-group” study, however, was not actually comprised of known gay parents, as the American Medical Association — along with seven other major professional associations — explained in a Golinski-DOMA amicus brief. The one thing Regnerus’s test group respondents almost all had in common, was that they were products of broken heterosexual homes. Without so much as asking his respondents “Is your mother lesbian?” Regnerus went ahead and labeled the parents of his “broken homes” test group as either “lesbian mothers” or “gay fathers.”

His control group, by contrast, was comprised of young adult children of continuously married heterosexual couples.

Regnerus compared the people from broken homes, to the people from continuously married parents, and declared that he had “revealed” that “children raised by same-sex parents” fare worse.

The invalid comparison invalidates the entire study, but does not stop gay-bashing bigots from wielding it as a political weapon.

The heterosupremacists’ motto is: “When all else fails, defame the sexual minorities you hate.”

Robert VerBruggen Sets Up a NOM-like, Anti-Gay Smear

On July 18, VerBruggen asked to interview me apropos of my Complaint against Regnerus, filed with the University of Texas. That Complaint now is the basis of an on-going inquiry.

I responded to VerBruggen’s e-mailed questions. In my responses, I specified that the Regnerus study is not valid, because it is a “test-group/control-group” study, yet makes no valid comparison between its test group and its control group. I also specified to VerBruggen that I allege that Regnerus and NOM officials are in seeming collusion, that they seem to have produced the study intending it to have a ‘”fixed” outcome defamatory of gays, and that they seem to continue in collusion, promoting the invalid study as a gay-bashing political weapon.

I have requested full documentation of all communications about the Regnerus study between 1) Regnerus and his study team; 2) UT; and 3) Regnerus’s NOM-linked funders at The Witherspoon Institute and elsewhere.  Those parties have refused to release the documents. UT petitioned Texas Attorney General Greg Abbot, a Republican, for exemptions, allowing the parties to keep their documentation related to the fraudulent Regnerus study secret.  The American Independent, too, wants this documentation, yet UT is seeking exemptions to their Freedom of Information Act document requests as well.

If there is no political collusion between the parties on the fraudulent Regnerus study — which is being used politically to gay-bash around the country and beyond — then what could there possibly be to hide in that documentation?

In his July 19, National Review article, VerBruggen tried to manipulate his readers into believing that my allegations are baseless.

He says “Rose does not allege serious ethical misconduct, such as plagiarism or falsifying data.”  Actually, I do. Not making any effort even to determine whether a survey respondent’s parent is gay or lesbian — as is the case with Regnerus — but then going ahead to label them as “lesbian mother” or “gay father” in a study that is said to measure how young adults “raised by same-sex parents fare” is falsifying evidence. Falsifying evidence is very rarely accidental and is usually done to support a hypothesis, i.e., in the case of the Regnerus study, the NOM hypothesis that homosexuals are dangerous to children.

For emphasis: “Data falsification” occurs when research is manipulated in any way that changes or omits data. Regnerus changed his data, by not determining whether a respondent’s parent was gay or lesbian, but then going on to label respondents’ parents as “gay fathers” or “lesbian mothers” in his published study. UT’s Population Research Center’s site for Regnerus’s “New Family Structures Study” falsely claims that the study measured how young adults “raised by same-sex parents” fare. That same University of Texas, NFSS site claims that Regnerus’s is the first large-scale study of “young adults who have spent time in households with two parents of the same sex.”

Regnerus’s study did not do that. Of his respondents whose parents got misleadingly labeled as “lesbian mothers” or “gay fathers,” almost all were products of broken heterosexual marriages. The study subjects’ “parents” therefore, were their mother and father pairs. If a 15-year-old’s heterosexual parents divorce, and then when the adolescent is 17, he is living with his mother, and she invites a woman to live in the home with them for four weeks, that second woman is not the 17-year-old’s “parent” in any sense. Yet that is exactly the ridiculous thing which Regnerus is presenting as a “fact” about his data.

Falsifying evidence is an ultimate form of scientific misconduct.

One thing VerBruggen’s did in his article — after not addressing Regnerus’s falsification of data — especially sticks in my craw.

Conflating homosexuals with pedophiles, a known falsehood, is a NOM anti-gay-bigotry specialty.

As irrefutably described in the AMA brief, Regnerus did not do anything to determine whether his young adult survey respondents from broken heterosexual marriages had lesbian mothers or gay fathers. He nonetheless went ahead and labeled the parents of these offspring of broken marriages lesbian or gay, on the basis of having asked them whether either of their parents had ever had a “romantic relationship with someone of the same sex.” That means of classifying somebody as gay or lesbian is as ludicrous as would be calling them Catholic because they had ever been inside a Catholic cathedral.

Surprise, surprise; Regnerus, in seeming collusion with his NOM-linked funders, found that children of — (falsely-labeled) —  “lesbian mothers” and “gay fathers” suffered more childhood sex abuse than children of “intact biological families.”

That Regnerus study “finding,” not supported by Regnerus’s data, is especially heinous, by virtue of it being an established, favorite NOM anti-gay smear, effectively, “Let children anywhere near homosexuals, and you increase the likelihood that they will be sexually abused.” Regnerus repeated that smear when he talked about his invalid study on ABC-TV.

In his published article, VerBruggen repeated the lie that children of gay parents are “more likely to experience sexual victimization,” and then he went on wrongly to allege the smear to be  “a statement that is consistent with Regnerus’s data.”

Well, no, it is not, but what do you expect from a heterosupremacist?

VerBruggen’s History of Enabling Those Bigoted Against Sexual Minorities

At Northwestern University, VerBruggen was editor-in-chief of the reactionary Northwestern Chronicle.  On Verbruggen’s editorial watch, J. Michael Bailey, an anti-trans bigot was allowed to trans-bash, and an individual was unjustifiably smeared.

Significantly, in an article – Robert Verbruggen and J. Michael Bailey — VerBruggen is said to have allowed Bailey “to post a rambling defense of his questionable research and ethics.” At the time, VerBruggen wrote, “To my knowledge, it is the first professor-written article we’ve ever run. There are of course conflicts with this setup, especially in that he is both a source and a writer.”

The summary continues: “Bailey’s work  described gender variance in metaphors of disease and impairment, said to be an extension of Bailey’s belief that homosexuality is an evolutionary mistake and a developmental error. Bailey’s writing on homosexual eugenics and his belief that male bisexuals are liars echo his thinking on trans issues as well.” The summary of the Bailey scandal, partially enabled by VerBruggen, notes that Bailey’s work was “tainted with charges of academic misconduct, practicing without a license, fabricating data, and sex with a research subject.”

In 2004, the Southern Poverty Law Center published a history of Bailey’s connections to hate groups. Bailey eventually resigned from Northwestern University in disgrace.

Though VerBruggen intended an ethical defense of Regnerus, he inadvertently gave his article a title that describes the Regnerus study to a “T”: The Gay Parenting Witch Hunt.

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.