A Baylor University institute has issued a letter of support on behalf of University of Texas faculty member Mark Regnerus’ disreputable study about children of gay parents
In response to growing criticism of Mark Regnerus so-called study about children of gay parents, a letter was released on June 20th through the Baylor Institute for the Studies of Religion, signed by 18 people, including Baylor ISR Director Byron Johnson.
Baylor University is located in Waco, Texas and is a private Baptist university that is also a nationally ranked and accredited liberal arts institution.
As previously reported on this site, an anti-gay study with funding arranged through the National Organization of Marriage’s Robert George appears to be political propaganda, rather than social science.
The Witherspoon Institute, located in Princeton, N.J. and unaffiliated with Princeton University, where Robert George is a Senior Fellow, gave Regnerus a $35,000 “planning grant” for the study, prior to giving him a grant for a study.
Regnerus has admitted that if he had opted for funding from the National Institutes of Health instead of from Witherspoon it would have served the long-term best interests of science.
Baylor ISR Director Byron Johnson, who issued and signed the Baylor letter, is also a Senior Fellow of the Witherspoon Institute, which first arranged the “planning grant” for Regnerus and then later arranged Regnerus’s study funding. The letter does not disclose that Regnerus himself is affiliated with the Baylor Institute, as a Non-Resident Scholar for Family and Religion. One might have thought that persons hoping to support Regnerus at this time would not create any further appearance that he could be in political cahoots with the study’s funders.
Although the 18 signers rely on their academic credentials to attempt to give authority to their letter, they do not actually address any of the substantive criticisms made of Regnerus’s study. They instead appear to seek further to deceive the public, by repeating points that have already been thoroughly discredited and debunked. Of particular concern is that the signers trumpeted Regnerus’s sampling method as the best available, when in fact, address based sampling would have been superior, though more costly and time consuming. Another concern is that whereas the signers cite Paul Amato’s commentary on the Regnerus study as evidence of the study’s alleged integrity, they do so without disclosing that Amato was a paid adviser for the study. Loren Marks also signed the Baylor letter. His twinned study was published simultaneously with Regnerus’s in Social Science Research, and used prior to publication by Paul Clement in a DOMA-related case in California.
The correct thing for Byron Johnson to do now, is to update the Baylor letter with notes that 1) he, Johnson is a Senior Fellow of the Witherspoon Institute, which first gave Regnerus a $35,000 “planning grant” before giving him monies for the actual study; 2) Regnerus has an affiliation with Baylor; and 3) Paul Amato was a paid adviser on the Regnerus study.
The image of the Baylor University logo and seal is courtesy of Wikipedia.
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.
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{ 5 comments }
Clearly, the author did not closely read the Baylor's letter, is not familiar with social science research, knows most of the signees political affiliation, and/or their beliefs about gay rights.
Although I respect the goals of the broader gay rights movement, this poorly researched article gives the screams of yellow journalism.
The Regnerus study is invalid because there is no valid comparison between a test group and a control group. Obviously, if somebody is doing a test-group/control-group study, the comparison has to be valid.
It's a SOUTHERN Baptist university. Run by the ayatollahs of the Southern Baptist Convention. There is no reason to expect anything scholarly or even honest to eminate from this university about LGBT people; no reason at all.
The Baylor letter refers to a research paper they claim supports Regnerus's claims that gays and lesbians are worse parents than intact heterosexual biological parents ([7] Daniel Potter). This would be worrying if true, because Potter's paper is well-written, carefully researched and a reasonably good summary of previous LGBT family studies. Although it comes from a conservative slant, the author clearly tries to keep personal biases at bay and reports his results in a clear, objective fashion.
On a thorough reading of Potter's paper, however, the Baylor signatories are simply wrong to claim it supports Regnerus's unstatistical tosh.
First off, and intriguingly, Daniel Potter is not on Baylor's list of signatories supporting the Regnerus study; and
Secondly, Potter's paper is clear that any negative impact that same-sex families might have on children's academic scores is due to the disruptive effects of a family breakup, not the fact that the parent/s are in same-sex relationships. This is what anti-Regnerus scholars have been saying all along. To quote Potter:
"On further examination, however, the negative relationship between same-sex parent families and children’s assessment scores does not appear to be a result of the type of family structure but instead a reflection of the transitions affiliated with these families."
The paper even says that in some models (not all, and not consistently, though) "children in same-sex parent families were expected to do slightly better than children in these opposite-sex parent nontraditional family structures."
What a breath of fresh air to read this quality of study methodology after ploughing through the Regnerus gumpf!
Hello: Please consider signing and sharing this petition. The petition demands that the Editorial Board of the journal Social Science Research retract the notorious, invalid, defamatory, anti-gay Regnerus gay-parenting “study.” According to the journal’s own Peer Review Policy, it takes MONTHS for the editor to locate experts to carry out peer review of submissions on esoteric topics like gay parenting. But, SSR’s editor James Wright did NOT get topic experts, the BIGOTS he had do the peer review had CONFLICTS OF INTEREST, and Regnerus’s submission was accepted for publication in only 5 ½ weeks, LESS TIME than the journal usually spends just to LOCATE expert peer reviewers. Be sure to read the full petition text inside the petition at this link: http://tinyurl.com/8q7ync4
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