Mark Regnerus’ parenting paper, with its faulty negative claims about gay parenting, has been roundly criticized by LGBT groups and mainstream psychological organizations and widely praised by anti-gay groups, in particular the National Organization for Marriage. Regnerus’ paper was published simultaneously in Social Science Research with a brief by professor Loren Marks critiquing the American Psychological Association’s support of same-sex parenting.
Scott Rose at The New Civil Rights Movement is building a compelling case that the publication of these two papers was coordinated with anti-gay groups who would capitalize on its political implications. Here are some of the clues Rose has discovered:
- Regnerus and Marks published their pieces together, but Marks cited Regnerus’ paper, so he clearly had foreknowledge of its conclusions. This suggests it is likely they intentionally published simultaneously as a “one-two election year punch.”
- Marks was originally called to testify in favor of Proposition 8, but admitted in deposition that he only had read parts of the studies from which he drew conclusions and had considered no research on gay and lesbian parents. His present research, published just two years later, attempts to make the same claims.
- Marks also made his paper available for the House Republican legal team defending the Defense of Marriage Act long before it was published in a peer-reviewed journal.
- There are multiple obvious ties between NOM co-founder Robert George, the Witherspoon Institute (which funded Regnerus’ research), Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion (which is defending the research), National Review (where NOM’s Maggie Gallagher frequently writes and where she has promoted the paper), and Mark Regnerus himself, suggesting particularly convenient collusion for spinning the political implications of the paper’s publication.
Anti-gay organizations have been quite intentional about promoting the paper’s fraudulent results since its publication, ignoring not only 30 years of past precedent but conflicting research that has been published in the interim. The number of convenient intersections allowing them to do so are becoming too plentiful to ignore. Fortunately, the study’s conclusions remain unfounded in the data and can continue to be disregarded as such.