Some LGBT People Feel Unsafe At Princeton University

Notoriously, the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) and the anti-gay-rights Witherspoon Institute got their starts in the same office space in Princeton, New Jersey.

NOM has since moved its headquarters to Washington, D.C., but Witherspoon continues at Princeton and does a great deal of its gay-bashing right on the Princeton campus.

Brad Wilcox, director of the Witherspoon program that funded a hoax study on same-sex parenting carried out by Mark Regnerus, also has a Princeton University association, as a member of Princeton University’s James Madison Society.

READ: Anti-Gay Regnerus Scandal: Editor James Wright Must Disclose Wilcox’s Role

Wilcox has a pile-up of conflicts of interest in relation to the Regnerus study, documented but which he has not yet publicly disclosed. Moreover, Witherspoon has more than once been caught out communicating deceptively about the Regnerus hoax.

On September 25, 2012 in The Daily Princetonian, there appeared Witherspoon’s Ana Samuel’s anti-gay promotion of the Witherspoon-Regnerus hoax. “Ana Samuel is a postdoctoral Bradley Fellow at the Witherspoon Intstitute,” her bio on the op-ed reads.

Samuel’s post includes ill-intentioned attacks against The New Normal and Zach Wahls, the straight ally and author of My Two Moms: Lessons of Love, Strength, and What Makes a Family.

Samuel could not even get through her first paragraph without misrepresenting the facts of the Regnerus hoax. Ms. Samuel falsely alleges, for example, that Witherspoon’s stand-alone site for the twinned Marks and Regnerus studies, “reported the data” from the Regnerus study.

That is a monstrous lie, considering that Regnerus has not yet publicly released his data anywhere.  It defies belief to imagine that Samuel — a post-doctoral fellow at the Witherspoon Institute — does not understand the difference between raw data and a published study.

As Witherspoon’s Wilcox assisted Regnerus with his data analysis, all the public has as of this writing is Wilcox’s and Regnerus’s manipulations of the study’s data, with no means of fact-checking anything against the actual data.

However that might be, several Princeton University community members left comments under Samuel’s post, expressing their feelings about the campus. These comments speak for themselves:

“I am a LGBT Princetonian. This editorial, the anti-LGBT work of so many faculty and graduate students at Princeton, as well as the intellectual and financial support by Princetonians of NOM and the Witherspoon Institute makes this place suffocating at times. The University sits tacitly by while all this occurs, which is a terrible way to really support the LGBT members of your community.”

“As someone who works with providing LGBTQ students with safe spaces on campus, this article really makes me so angry. I’ve already had LGBTQ students come up to me and express distress over this article. Shame on the Daily Prince for not pausing to think of the impact of this article on an entire demographic of the student and faculty body.”

This reporter sent an e-mail to Samuel, asking if she acknowledges Wilcox’s documented conflicts of interest invovling the Regnerus study. No reply has yet been received.

Below, screenshots of some of the comments on Samuel’s piece:

 

 

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.