Christine Woodman offers a follow-up to her piece from last week about Mark Regnerus, the sociologist who claims gay parents are bad for children.
Last week I wrote about Mark Regnerus’ paper on the host of negative outcomes created by LGBT parenting. In my article I suggested that perhaps Regnerus’ study was deliberately flawed in a way which would cast gay families in the worst possible light.
Recently some new evidence has emerged that raises even more concern. Philip Cohen, a well-respected sociologist and expert on families, looked at the dates on the study and found that Regnerus had written the results and sent it to his publisher before the survey was even finished. In fact, he submitted his journal article 23 days before the data were delivered to him. Cohen suggests that perhaps Regnerus time-traveled, which is “definitely cheating.”
Regnerus responded to Cohen’s charge by admitting that he had, in fact, submitted his article almost a month before the data were complete, but argued that he was satisfied that he already knew what the results would be. Perhaps it wasn’t time-travel but psychic abilities that enabled Regnerus’ speedy results. In either case, it seems unlikely that he could have taken the time to examine the data thoughtfully, thoroughly, and in a scholarly manner.
The entire publishing process for Rengerus’ paper seems to have subverted the normal way in which things are done in academia. For starters, it took only six weeks for his article to go from submission to being published. For those who publish in academic journals, that is the equivalent of the Immaculate Conception: It could happen, but it would take a miracle.
To muddy the water even further, the journal that published Regenerus’ findings has an unusual “single blind” peer review process and it allows authors to suggest their own peer reviewers. In other words, the person or persons who checked Regnerus’ work knew whose work they were reviewing and may have been chosen by him. At the very least, it seems unlikely that there were any critics reviewing his article given the speed with which it was published. The point of peer review is that scientists are checking each other’s work before it goes out to the public. In this case, it seems that the system was subverted.
At this point, it seems certain that Regnerus, his study, and the ethics of both will face intense scrutiny. Regnerus has promised to make the actual survey responses, all of the raw data, available to other researchers. Given how many people have expressed their concern over the way in which the study was conducted, it seems certain that researchers will thoroughly examine every part of the study and results. At some point, we may be able to understand what his study is actually telling us.
What we should remember, however, is that his study can never tell us how being raised in an LGBT family actually impacts children. Despite having surveyed thousands of people, Regnerus’ study only included two people who were raised in what most of us think of as an LGBT family: a gay couple who raises a child from birth to adulthood. The rest of the people in his study were either in the control group or were raised in a mishmash of family situations. In fairness to Regnerus, the majority of even “young adults” (ages 18-39) were raised in the dark ages of gay rights. If you consider that over 70% of the people in his survey were born before the World Health Organization had declassified homosexuality as a mental illness, it makes sense that he only found two people raised in a true LGBT family. The bottom line is perhaps best expressed by William Saletan: “the study doesn’t document the failure of same-sex marriage. It documents the failure of the closeted, broken, and unstable households that preceded same-sex marriage.”
It will be years if not decades before social scientists can tell us what happens when children are raised by a loving and committed gay couple with minimal social stigma. By then, it will hopefully be considered as irrelevant and bigoted as studying the impact of mixed race relationships on children.
Christine Woodman is a mother, wife, advocate, and graduate student in the sociology department of George Mason University. After graduation, she plans to devote her full attention to advocating for the rights of children in religious environments. You may reach her at cwoodman@gmu.edu.
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