In July of 2012, a sociologist at the University of Texas, Mark Regnerus released an "academic" study that focused on children of gay parents. He concluded that "children raised by gay or lesbian parents on average are at a significant disadvantage when compared to children raised by the intact family of their married, biological mother and father." This assertion flew directly in the face of legitimate studies that determine that children of same-sex household showed no adverse affects, and in fact flourish just fine, thank you very much.
Anti-gay groups were quick to pick up this study to prove that LGBT people were a danger to children, citing it in court case after court case in our fight for equal rights. As people began to question the integrity of the paper, it quickly came to light that the Regnerus Study was an idea cooked up by the deeply conservative Witherspoon Institute in order to influence court cases headed to the Supreme Court. A member of the Social Science Research Editorial Board who originally published the study was assigned to review the publication and called the study "bullshit".
Like Regnerus, the editor of Social Science Research, James D. Wright, has been at the receiving end of an outpouring of anger over the paper. At the suggestion of another scholar, Wright, a professor of sociology at the University of Central Florida, assigned a member of the journal’s editorial board—Darren E. Sherkat, a professor of sociology at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale—to examine how the paper was handled.
Sherkat was given access to all the reviews and correspondence connected with the paper, and was told the identities of the reviewers. According to Sherkat, Regnerus’s paper should never have been published. His assessment of it, in an interview, was concise: “It’s bullsh*t,” he said.
Other independent reviews of the study came to the same conclusion and the Regnerus Study was completely dismissed as a ham-fisted tool specifically designed to manipulate the serious debate taking place around marriage equality and LGBT rights. Not that this stopped outfits like the Family Research Council and the National Organization for Marriage from citing that bullshit to this day. The only people who will still give Mark Regnerus the time of day are people who, like him, have no problem lying and twisting facts if it means they can keep LGBT people from obtaining equality.
Today, Good As You published this pitiful little audio release of Regnerus going on The Drew Mariani Show yesterday to complain to his religious right audience that it was us nasty bloggers what did him in.
Mark Regnerus: Um, yeah, it exploded and it certainly the most talked about sociology article in the last 5 or 10 years as far as I can tell.
Drew Mariani: Good for you.
Regnerus: Thanks.
Mariani: Your study was published through your position at the University of Texas, but then you got hauled before an academic review board. What happened there?
Regnerus: Yeah, yeah. That was the mastermind of the accomplishment of some ne'er do well bloggers out there who managed to get the University of Texas here to open up what they call an "inquiry" into scientific misconduct and I had to go before a committee of my peers and talk about how the study came to be and what happened, etc. and it was fairly promptly dismissed. But it's kind of a lens into the harassment, of sorts, that is common among people who are working in this area. I'm not alone in being subject to lots of vitriol, especially on line, especially in the blogosphere where people hide behind acronyms and things like that.
Poor Mark Regnerus, all those mean acronyms out to get him and his little study too. Penning a bullshit paper explicitly for the purpose of giving bullshit hate groups fodder to carry out the bullshit war against LGBT Americans had nothing to do with his being discredited by his peers in the science-based community. What a victim he is, just like all the other victims out there rending their garments over the injustice of justice.
So, my ne-er do well fellow bloggers, chalk one up for the good guys. He can blame us all he wants for being exposed as the junk-science pedlar he is. As long as there are people out there willing to lie and obfuscate to keep me and my brothers and sisters under their thumbs, there will be people like you and me to see they are exposed for the charlatans they are. If they consider our insistence on truth and fair play to be vitriolic harassment, then that's a crying shame.