In an article on the decision of Idaho’s governor and attorney general to petition the Supreme Court for review of the Ninth Circuit’s invalidation of the state’s marriage law, ThinkProgress’s Emily Atkin takes a moment to bash the research of University of Texas sociologist Mark Regnerus regarding the adult outcomes of having been raised by a parent or parents who had same-sex relationships.
Full disclosure: I work for the Witherspoon Institute, which provided most of the funding for Regnerus’s “New Family Structures Study,” the first published, peer-reviewed research into such parenting outcomes to employ a nationwide, random sample of relevant subjects who were then extensively interviewed about their upbringing. The Institute supported Regnerus’s independent research without in any way shaping how he conducted it or the conclusions he reached.
Idaho’s petition to the Supreme Court does not cite Regnerus’s research, but because Idaho does make a claim about the benefits to children of being raised by their own biological parents who stay together, Atkin devotes an aside to Regnerus, whose work clearly continues to irk the ideologues of the marriage revolution. It’s hard to count how many times I have seen Regnerus’s study described in lazy journalism as “discredited,” when it has never been withdrawn, or refuted by any subsequent peer-reviewed publication. For liberal commentators, “discredited” in this field seems to mean “everyone I know dislikes it.” The swarming appears to have persuaded some lazy and/or biased judges who know little about social science as well, which is unfortunate.
But Atkin takes such calumny—and laziness—to a new low. She writes that Regnerus’s study “was found to be ‘bullshit’ by the academic journal that originally published it.”
That is absolutely false. Here’s what actually happened (for more details go here and here): following the predictable controversy that erupted over Regnerus’s findings—that across multiple life outcomes, the adult children of parents who’d been in same-sex relationships fared worse than those raised in intact biological families—the editor of the journal that published it, Social Science Research, commissioned a member of his editorial board to perform an audit of the peer-review process that resulted in its publication. The sociologist chosen to do the audit brought hostile presuppositions to his work, and before the audit was published, declared in an interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education that Regnerus’s findings were “bullshit.”
But the auditor never used such language in his published audit, and while he said that he personally would not have published the study nor recommended its publication as a peer reviewer, he found no fault with the scholars who did do the peer review (who unanimously recommended publishing Regnerus), nor with the journal editor who followed their recommendation. He even went so far as to say he “may well have made the same decisions” in the editor’s place. And the journal stood by the original publication.
The journal’s editor, now more than two years after publication of Regnerus’s study and of follow-up commentary following the audit, has taken no steps to withdraw the article, nor has he ever so much as hinted that it was anything other than a valuable contribution to the social science on sexuality and parenting, which it was worthwhile for the journal to publish.
So as for Atkin’s characterization of Regnerus’s work as “found to be ‘bullshit’ by the academic journal that originally published it”? In light of the facts that “the academic journal” said no such thing, and that even a hostile auditor said no such thing in his professional capacity, that claim is a complete falsehood of an even more malodorous kind.