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Six More Sociology PhDs Call For Retraction Of Regnerus Anti-Gay ‘Study’

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A hoax study on gay parenting funded by the NOM-linked Witherspoon Institute and marked by deliberate deception and fraud is currently being used as an anti-equality weapon in the courts and in the 2012 elections.

The anti-gay hoax was carried out by Mark Regnerus of the University of Texas at Austin.

READ: Opinion: NOM Shill Mark Regnerus’ Long History Of Using Religion To Attack Gays

Witherspoon and Regnerus continue deliberately lying to the public about the study, alleging that none of Regnerus’s funding agency representatives participated in designing or conducting the study.

In truth, Witherspoon Program Director Brad Wilcox recruited Regnerus to do the work, was involved in getting him a $55,000 planning grant, and then collaborated with him on the booby-trapped study design before Witherspoon approved Regnerus for full study funding, which reached a known minimum of $785,000.

Even as Regnerus and Witherspoon continue lying by saying that Regnerus is independent of his anti-gay-rights funders, Regnerus is scheduled to promote the hoax side-by-side with his funders on November 3 in a clear, anti-gay-rights context at Princeton.

Although the American Medical Association and the President of the American Sociological Association have put their names to documents calling Regnerus’s methodology scientifically unsound, the sleazy, NOM-linked characters who commissioned the hoax continue to push it as though it were scientifically valid.

Previously on this site, Dr. Andrew Perrin has delivered a devastating science-based take-down of the Regnerus hoax. Moreover, Dr. Michael Schwartz as well as Dr. Lori Holyfield have called for the Regnerus submission to be retracted from publication.

Here, six additional Sociology Ph.D.s call for the Regnerus article to be retracted from publication, and a further three express their dismay over the Regnerus scandal:

 1) Gary J. Gates, Ph.D. is Williams Distinguished Scholar at the Williams Institute of the UCLA School of Law:

“My position is clear. The fact that two of the three peer reviewers of the Regnerus paper were paid consultants undermines the review process to the point that I do not believe the academy should consider this paper to have undergone legitimate peer review. Elsevier should take steps to either formally retract the paper or subject it to an unbiased peer review process.”

2) Heidi Levitt, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston:

“I think it is appropriate to call for retraction. I have signed a letter of protest to that effect which outlines the reasons for retraction.”

3) Saskia Sassen, Ph.D. is Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University, and Co-Chair of the Columbia University Committee on Global Thought:

“I was one of the signers of the original letter and have throughout supported this effort.  I find this unacceptable; the Regnerus study should be retracted from publication.”

4) Wendy Simonds, Ph.D. is Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Sociology at Georgia State University:

“I am not at all surprised by this whole situation, given Regnerus’s previous book on teen sexuality. In that book, he and his co-author present without criticism “research” of others in support of the notion that women who have unprotected sex (with the same partner of course) are less likely to be depressed than women who don’t *because* of the semen in their vaginas (imagine the pharmacological possibilities!!) as well as “research” in support of the notion that women regret abortions. Meanwhile, they also “show” that the more sexual partners young women have, the worse off they are in terms of mental health — while of course the same is not true of young men (then can handle being sluts mentally).”

“I support the retraction of Regnerus’s article, because the review process was not truly blind. Consultants and/or funders on projects should not serve as reviewers of papers that emerge from the projects in which they have been involved. Additionally, Regnerus’s “data” on gay and lesbian parents are unrepresentative of gay and lesbian parents, and, in my view, are presented so as to advance a homophobic agenda.”

5) Eric Anderson, Ph.D. is Professor of Sociology at the University of Winchester in the United Kingdom:

Dr. Anderson previously has described the Regnerus study as anti-gay propaganda, explaining that that is the only term he can think of to describe a study analysis and discussion that is designed to denigrate gay people outside the boundaries of empirical evidence. Asked if he is calling for the Regnerus paper to be retracted from publication, Dr. Anderson said: “Oh God yes. This research was not sociology as science; it was instead a coup d’état against gay parenting.”

6) Amy C. Wilkins, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Colorado:

In an e-mail response, Dr. Wilkins wrote: “I HAVE followed this case and am outraged about it.” and “Thanks for your persistence with this.”

7) Lisa Brush, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor at the University of Pittsburgh:

In an e-mail message, Dr. Brush wrote: “I have followed with considerable appreciation your lengthy and detailed posts on this issue, and have registered my dismay with the Regnerus article.” and “Thank you for your work on this issue.”

8) 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 Regnerus’s publisher, 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.”

9) Nancy Naples, Ph.D. is Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences of the University of Connecticut:

“I am calling for the Regnerus article to be retracted from publication.”

 

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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Bombshell WSJ Report: Trump Pressured DOJ Attorneys to Sue States in the Supreme Court to Overturn Election

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January 23, 2021

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President Donald Trump pressured U.S. Department of Justice attorneys, possibly including former Attorney General Bill Barr, to file a lawsuit against four U.S. states in the U.S. Supreme Court, in one of his final attempts to overturn the election before leaving office.

The Wall Street Journal reports late Saturday night that effort “failed due to pushback from his own appointees in the Justice Department, who refused to file what they viewed as a legally baseless lawsuit in the Supreme Court.”

The Journal also confirms Friday night’s New York Times reporting that Trump attempted to remove his own acting Attorney General, Jeffrey Rosen, after Barr left the DOJ just two days before Christmas.

According to the Journal, “senior department officials threatened to resign en masse should Mr. Trump fire then-acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, according to several people familiar with the discussions.”

“Senior department officials, including Mr. Rosen, former Attorney General William Barr and former acting Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall refused to file the Supreme Court case, concluding that there was no basis to challenge the election outcome and that the federal government had no legal interest in whether Mr. Trump or Mr. Biden won the presidency,” the paper adds.

The paper does not specify the exact timeframe of when Trump tried to force DOJ to file the lawsuit, but based on its report it had to have been after December 11, when the Supreme Court dismissed what most election law attorneys considered a frivolous suit filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, along with other Republican state attorneys general.

This is a breaking news and developing story. 

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'DANGEROUS FOOLS'

GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy Says “Everyone” Is to Blame for Capitol Riots

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15 hours ago

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January 23, 2021

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While Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California has previously said that he thinks former President Donald Trump bears some responsibility for the January 6 coup attempt in which his supporters ransacked the Capitol to overturn the election that he and Republicans baselessly claimed was stolen, McCarthy added in a Thursday interview, “I also think everybody across this country has some responsibility [for the coup attempt.]”

McCarthy then said that anti-Trump Democrats, rude social media users, unprepared law enforcement authorities were all responsible too, even though Trump literally told his followers on the morning of January 6 to march to the Capitol and fight to stop legislators from approving the election victory of now-President Joe Biden. 

“I think this is what we have to get to the bottom of, and when you start talking about who has responsibilities,” McCarthy said. “I think there’s going to be a lot more questions, a lot more answers we have to have in the coming future.”

It’s especially telling that his Senate counterpart, now-Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has directly blamed Trump for the riots.

“The mob was fed lies,” McConnell said Wednesday. “They were provoked by the president and other powerful people, and they tried to use fear and violence to stop a specific proceeding of the first branch of the federal government which they did not like.” 

After months of making baseless claims that a national conspiracy of widespread voter fraud stole the election from him, a claim laughed out of courts 60 times over for lack of evidence by judges that Trump himself appointed, Trump held a “Stop the Steal” rally on the morning of January 6 in which he said, that he won the election “by a landslide” and encouraged his followers to “stop the steal” by going to the Capitol. If people don’t “fight like hell,” Trump said, “you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

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'ETHICS PROGRAM HAS BEEN RAZED TO THE GROUND'

Russia Explodes with Protests Against Putin Poisoning and Jailing His Biggest Opponent

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15 hours ago

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January 23, 2021

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Russian citizens in 38 cities are protesting the country’s sham elections in which Russian President Vladimir Putin has felt so threatened by the opposition candidate, anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny, that he has had him imprisoned and poisoned in an attempt to silence his voice and kill his movement.

The Russian presidential elections are a complete sham used to legitimate Putin’s power. In the last election, Putin “won” nearly 77 percent of the vote amid claims of ballot stuffing, the Kremlin choosing which candidates get to run, police arresting any anti-Putin protesters and pro-Putin candidates receiving far more financial backing than his opponents.

Navalny himself, a popular anti-corruption campaigner who is one of Putin’s most outspoken critics, according to The Week, has previously been barred from running due to a trumped-up and controversial fraud conviction allegedly masterminded by Putin. In August 2020, Navalny was poisoned with a nerve agent called Novichok and survived his hospitalization. Navalny has said he got a Russian federal agent to reveal how he was poisoned, though the Kremlin has denied any involvement.

Three days ago, Navalny was jailed once more for allegedly violating his parole. He now inhabits Matrosskaya Tishina or Sailor’s Silence, a jail in Moscow’s north-east region that has housed high-ranking prisoners that authorities have wanted to cut off from the outside world since the Soviet era, according to Reuters. The jail is notoriously deadly.

Russian citizens across the nation have seemingly had enough and have begun protesting his imprisonment, as the videos below attest. Hundreds have been arrested as police fight to maintain control.

The U.S. Embassy in Russia has weighed in by saying, “We’re watching reports of protests in 38 Russian cities, arrests of 350+ peaceful protesters and journalists. The U.S. supports the right of all people to peaceful protest, freedom of expression. Steps being taken by Russian authorities are suppressing those rights.”

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