NOM, the National Organization For Marriage, recently admitted to guilt in 18 counts of California state campaign finance law violations.
For breaking the law eighteen times, NOM in California had to pay a $49,000 fine.
That fine is less that the tens of millions that NOM spends — and/or organizes towards spending — for its allegedly “Christian” mission of blocking gay people from civil rights — at a time when there over 600,000 homeless in the United States.
The $49,000 fine also is less than the $55,000 “planning grant” that NOM-related officials, as part of the Witherspoon Institute, arranged for a study booby trapped to make gay parents look bad.
The study, by Mark Regnerus of the University of Texas at Austin, features a cherry picked control group compared to a test group loaded up with variables.
All of Regnerus’s control group respondents were raised by continuously-married heterosexual couples.
By contrast, Regnerus’s test group respondents, improperly labeled as having “lesbian mothers” and “gay fathers,” had suffered such variables as 1) one parent dying prematurely; 2) a single parent disabled in an accident; 3) a mother who divorced an abusive father to get her children to safety.
Regnerus tells a ridiculous lie to explain why he had no choice but to make the booby trapped comparison.
He says he simply could not find enough young adult children raised by gay couples.
Yet, Michael Rosenfeld’s 2009 study Nontraditional Families and Childhood Progress through School studied 3,502 children of gay couples who had been together for at least five years.
If Regnerus as a professional sociologist truly intended to study children raised by “lesbian mothers” or “gay fathers,” then he had a scientific obligation to develop and to implement a study plan that would actually allow him to interview children raised by lesbian mothers or gay fathers.
Instead, by his dishonest and unscientific means, and in collusion with his anti-gay-rights funders, Regnerus alleges to have proven a correlation between gay parents and bad child outcomes, though his “study” proves no such correlation.
This is one of the chief fallacies of the Regnerus study: Regnerus alleges to have found a correlation between gay parents and bad child outcomes; but in documentable reality, Regnerus found no such thing.
His test group was loaded up with variables, hence, he has no way of knowing which — if any — of the variables correlates to the perceived “bad” child outcomes, for those in his test group who had “bad” outcomes; not all did, by a long shot. And, not all children of heterosexual parents had good outcomes in the Regnerus study, either.
Yet, NOM officials certainly are getting their money’s worth of gay-bashing hate-and-fear mongering out of the Regnerus “study;” in NOM blog comments on the Brown/Savage event, for example, somebody wrote: “I wonder if the poor kid will have [sic] experience the horrific outcome of same sex parenting that Regenerus found in his research.”
National Organization for Marriage officials, moreover, have been heavily involved in lying about the study since before it was even published.
Here is a sampling of NOM’s Brian Brown’s lies about the Regnerus study:
1) NOM’s BRIAN BROWN LIES ABOUT THE REGNERUS STUDY HAVING BEEN PEER REVIEWED
During a debate with Dan Savage, NOM’s Brian Brown alleged that the Regnerus study was published through the normal procedures followed by Social Science Research (SSR), the journal that published the deliberately booby-trapped, anti-gay Regnerus “study.”
However, SSR did not follow its published Peer Review Policy in processing the Regnerus submission for publication.
Ethical and appropriate, professional peer review is a sine qua non of scientific publishing. There are no exceptions. Without ethical and appropriate, professional peer review, a submission to a scientific journal should never be published. Publishing a submission to a scientific journal without putting it through ethical and appropriate professional peer review undermines trust in science, just as violating campaign finance laws 18 times tends to destroy trust in the organization — NOM — engaging in such contemptuous breaking of campaign finance laws.
Now, according to SSR’s Peer Review Policy, peer reviewers “are matched to papers according to their expertise.”
No gay parenting topic experts peer reviewed the Regnerus submission.
You do not ask a brain surgeon to peer review a podiatry study. You do not ask a podiatrist to to peer review a study on brain surgery. The right topic experts for a study on gay parenting, are gay parenting topic experts.
Additionally, SSR’s Peer Review Policy states that typically, it takes 2 to 3 months for a submission to be peer reviewed “but substantially longer review times are not uncommon, especially for papers on esoteric topics where finding qualified referees can itself take months.”
By contrast to that, Regnerus submitted his paper on February 1, 2012 and then SSR editor-in-chief James Wright approved it for publication just 41 days later, without a single topic expert having been involved in the peer review.
To repeat those facts for emphasis: SSR’s Peer Review Policy says that normally, it takes months just to find qualified peer reviewers. Yet, dismayingly, without being peer reviewed by any topic experts, the Regnerus submission was accepted for publication in just 41 days.
Additionally, some of the peer reviewers were paid consultants for the Regnerus study design. What that means, is that the same people paid to booby trap the study design against gay parents also had the power to green-light the study for publication.
That not only violates SSR’s Peer Review Policy, it violates all ethics of scientific publishing. Vanderbilt University Sociologist Tony N. Brown, Editor of the American Sociological Association’s American Sociological Review, has said: “journal editors should always seek knowledgeable reviewers who do not have any conflict of interest regarding the submitted author or the study’s funder.” (Bolding added).
While it is true that 1) an SSR editorial board member used 2) the same false words NOM’s Brian Brown used about 3) none of SSR’s policies having been violated, that board member also, obviously 4) is lying, as a comparison of SSR’s Peer Review Policy and the facts of the case demonstrate.
The Regnerus study did not receive ethical and appropriate professional peer review.
NOM’s Brian Brown is lying when he says it did.
Science advances when experiments and studies are replicated and produce the same results. The Regnerus study as published would never survive ethical and appropriate professional peer review; thus, the Regnerus study as published can not possibly be replicated, produce the same results, and be approved as valid by ethical and appropriate professional peer reviewers.
After all, the study features a cherry picked control group compared to a test group loaded up with variables.
Cherry picking a control group is dishonest, a form of lying.
The necessity for eliminating lurking variables — to say nothing of glaring variables — is taught in every Sociology 101 course and every Statistics 101 course.
2) NOM’s BRIAN BROWN LIES ABOUT HOW MANY PEOPLE REGNERUS INTERVIEWED
In a June 15, 2012 NOM blog post with the comically dubious title of The Big Mo for Marriage, NOM’s Brian Brown lied by saying “The researchers interviewed more than 15,000 people.” (Bolding added).
As a glance at Regnerus’s Codebook shows, Regnerus screened 15,058 people, but only actually interviewed a total of 2,988 survey participants.
In a sociological study, screening consists of asking people a few questions to see whether they qualify for you to interview them. Interviewing them consists of having them answer all the questions in your full study survey.
Screening and interviewing are two completely different sociological activities.
Brown’s misrepresentation of how many people Regnerus interviewed fits a pattern of Witherspoon/NOM/Regnerus lies that seek to impress the public by representing Regnerus’s study as having been larger than it in fact was.
Here is why this is so important a matter.
Regnerus alleges that his study results are statistically accurate for the entire US population. That is to say, were Regnerus telling the truth, whatever his findings show as percent findings for any group, would consistently be the percent findings for that group throughout the country.
However, Regnerus only surveyed a total of 248 children of “gay” parents. At that, his labeling of study subjects’ parents as “lesbian mothers” and “gay fathers” was unscientific and unethical.
Leaving aside Regnerus’s labeling ethics, what about his numbers? Can one produce a statistically reliable study with only 248 children of gay parents?
Dr. Steven Nock, an expert in large random sampling survey studies, was asked by the Canadian Attorney General to submit an affidavit in Halpern v. Canada.
According to Dr. Nock’s affidavit, for a gay parenting study to be statistically valid, a minimum of 800 gay parents would have to be included in the study. Nock estimates that to find 800 gay parents to interview, a researcher would have to screen at least 40,000 people. And, Nock said that screening 40,000 people is “not a particularly large screening task.”
Yet, there is the NOM shill Regnerus, alleging that he carried out an unprecedentedly enormous study, and his NOM co-conspirator Brian Brown lying about how many people the Regnerus study interviewed.
To clarify — NOM’s Brian Brown is boasting that Regnerus “interviewed” 15,000 people yet could not find people actually raised by gay parents. NOM’s Brian Brown talks about the 15,000 Regnerus screened, as though Regnerus had carried out some unimaginably huge task. Yet the expert Dr. Steven Nock says that in order to find enough gay parents for a study, one would have to screen at least 40,000 people. Regnerus screened 25,000 people too few, to meet Dr. Nock’s estimated minimum of people who had to be screened, for enough gay parents to be represented in a valid gay parenting study based on a large random sampling.
Now, by way of comparison, let’s look at how many people were interviewed for actual large studies.
In 2011, the Pew Research Center conducted a large national random sample survey of Muslims living in the United States. Pew interviewed – not screened — interviewed — 55,000 people, of which 1,050 were Muslims in the United States.
The comparison:
Pew interviewed:
55,000 people, of which 1,050 were the study’s test group, Muslims living in the US.
By contrast, Regnerus interviewed:
only 2,988 people, of which 248 were the study’s test group, children of “same-sex” parents.
Another comparison with an actual large study:
In 2005, a large random sample survey was done in India on the prevalence of major neurological disorders in Kolkata.
The comparison:
Indian researchers interviewed: 52,377 people
Regnerus interviewed: 2,988 people
Another comparison with an actual large study:
A study on tobacco smokers in Brazil interviewed — not screened – interviewed 8589 people.
The comparison:
Brazilian researchers interviewed: 8589 people.
Regnerus interviewed: 2,988 people.
Whereas Regnerus only interviewed 2,988 people, NOM’s Brian Brown lies by saying that Regnerus interviewed “over 15,000 people.”
These things matter. If Regnerus needed more money from his NOM-linked funders in order to be able to interview an adequate number of children of actual same-sex parents, then Regnerus should have insisted on more money from his NOM-linked funders.
Whereas his NOM-linked funders are said to have given Regnerus $785,000 for his booby-trapped study, they are spending – and/or involved in the arrangements for spending — tens upon tens of millions attacking gay people, their families and their rights in the 2012 elections.
It is not that Regnerus’s NOM-linked funders could not have come up with enough money for a study that would interview adequate numbers of children raised by same-sex couples.
It is, rather, that NOM officials wanted an anti-gay demonizing weapon for the 2012 election season.
The matter of the number of persons Regnerus interviewed is related to another of Brian Brown’s lies about the Regnerus study, namely:
3) NOM’s BRIAN BROWN LIES ABOUT THE RELATIONSHIP OF THE REGNERUS STUDY TO OTHER GAY PARENTING STUDIES
The Regnerus study was twinned in publication in Social Science Research to another study by the professional gay-basher Loren Marks. Marks’s bachelor’s and master’s degrees were earned from Brigham Young University, a school with an “honor code” that forbids school community members from “promoting” homosexual relations as being morally acceptable.
Previously, when NOM attempted to use Marks as an “expert witness” in a Proposition 8 case, Marks’s “expert” testimony was barred from the courtroom after Marks was questioned, and admitted that he had not read studies from which he quoted, and that he did not know anything about gay-led families.
The Marks paper — twinned in publication to the Regnerus paper — argues that all prior studies on same-sex parents’ child outcomes were based on small samplings that are not statistically generalizable to the whole population.
Conspicuously, the Marks paper was twinned in publication with the Regnerus paper, to bolster the fraudulent propaganda claims that the Regnerus study actually consists of a large enough sampling to be statistically generalizable to the whole population.
To put the argument in its most simple terms, Marks says “Small studies bad, big studies good.” In his Big Mo post, Brian Brown exploits the Marks study to beat the “Small studies bad, big studies good” horse, in an attempt to delude the public into believing that the Regnerus study was large enough to give meaningful results about children raised by gay parents.
But the Regnerus study was not large enough to give meaningful results about children raised by gay parents.
When NOM’s Brian Brown trots out the Marks paper to propagandize about the Regnerus study being large enough, when the Regnerus study was not large enough, NOM’s Brian Brown is lying about the scientific significance of the number of study subjects Regnerus interviewed.
Remember: Regnerus only interviewed 2,988 total people. The study of Brazilian smokers interviewed 8,589 people. The study of the prevalence of neurological disorders in India interviewed 52,377 people. The Pew study of Muslims living in the US interviewed 55,000 people.
To carry out a valid study of gay parents’ child outcomes, Regnerus needed to screen and then interview a lot more people than he did.
All of NOM’s Brian Brown’s statements that the Regnerus study was large enough are lies.
4) NOM’s BRIAN BROWN LIES ABOUT WHETHER REGNERUS’S STUDY SUBJECTS LIVED WITH “LESBIAN MOTHERS”
In his “Big Mo” NOM blog post, Brian Brown says this:
“91 percent lived with their mothers while she had this” same-sex “romantic relationship. But most of these relationships turned out to be fleeting.”
In truth, the Regnerus study methodology did not allow Regnerus to determine whether his study respondents’ parents ever actually had a “same sex romantic relationship.”
Eight major professional associations including the American Medical Association filed a Golinski-DOMA brief.
Writing in that brief, the AMA noted that Regnerus’s “data does not show whether the perceived” same-sex “romantic relationship ever in fact occurred.”
When a group of over 200 Ph.D.s and M.D.s sent a letter to Social Science Research, complaining about the Regnerus study’s lack of intellectual integrity, they said “We have substantial concerns about the merits of this paper and question whether it actually uses methods and instruments that answer the research questions posed in the paper.”
Who are you going to believe on science? Eight major professional associations including the AMA, and over 200 Ph.D.s and M.D.s, or NOM’s lying anti-gay president Brian Brown, whose organization’s leaders arranged for the funding of the Regnerus study and are promoting it heavily in anti-gay-rights political contexts?
Given that Regnerus’s ”data does not show whether the perceived romantic relationship ever in fact occurred,” Brian Brown is lying when he says that 91 percent of Regnerus’s study respondents “lived with their mothers while she had this” same-sex “romantic relationship.”
In promoting the Regnerus study in anti-gay-rights political contexts, Regnerus and NOM rely heavily on public ignorance about sociology. One false notion they especially push, is that gosh darn it, it’s just too difficult to ask meaningful questions towards determining the actual sexual orientation of a study subject’s parent. Regnerus could not possibly have done a more scientific job determining his respondents’ parents’ sexual orientation, because nobody knows how to do that! The whole field of studying gay parents is in too early a stage!
Yet, in 2009, the Williams Institute published its study titled Best Practices for Asking Questions about Sexual Orientation on Surveys. Regnerus worked as though in ignorance of that document.
5) NOM’s BRIAN BROWN LIES ABOUT HAVING RESPECT FOR SCIENCE
After saying that he is not a social scientist, Brian Brown says ”I respect the scientific enterprise enough to wish for open, robust scientific debate.”
Notice what Brown is doing with this particular lie; he is creating a false impression that there are scientific grounds for debating whether a parent’s sexual orientation, heterosexual or homosexual, per se, correlates to or causes a good or bad child outcome.
There currently is no scientific debate about whether a parent’s sexual orientation, heterosexual or homosexual, per se, correlates to or causes a good or bad child outcome.
All available scientific evidence shows that nothing about a parent’s sexual orientation, per se, impacts child outcomes.
That means, it can be legitimate to suggest that more studies might be done to examine whether a parent’s sexual orientation, heterosexual or homosexual, per se, correlates to or causes a good or bad child outcome.
But, there is no scientific basis for debating whether a parent’s sexual orientation, heterosexual or homosexual, per se, correlates to or causes a good or bad child outcome. And that is because, there is no scientific evidence that a parent’s sexual orientation, per se, correlates to or causes a child outcome good or bad.
Genuine scientific debate does not — and could not possibly — occur as a result of NOM/Witherspoon’s Robert George getting a $55,000 “planning grant” for Mark Regnerus, with Mark Regnerus then presenting a booby trapped study design to Robert George in order to get green-lighted for $785,000 of study funding. Distortions of the scientific record never are involved in legitimate, actual scientific debate over scientific interpretation of study findings.
Even NOM’s Brian Brown admits there is no scientific basis for saying that a parent’s sexual orientation correlates to or causes a child outcome good or bad. Look what Brown said in his Big Mo post:
“Does this new study prove gay parents harm their children? No. . . . We still can’t say that from scientific evidence because we don’t have good data.”
Yet immediately, Brown goes on to say that the Marks and Regnerus studies “show us the claim that science has disproven and ruled out of court the idea that children need a mom and dad is just bogus.”
Much like Maggie Gallagher, NOM’s Brian Brown lies through his teeth while talking out both sides of his gay-bashing bigot mouth. First he admits that the Regnerus study did not prove that gay parents harm children, then he says that all children “need” heterosexual parents. He has no explanation for why an adopted child, for example, would “need” abusive heterosexual parents but not loving gay parents.
And why are so many children up for adoption? In many cases, children are up for adoption because their heterosexual parents neglected, abused or abandoned them.
If NOM’s Brian Brown had respect for science, he would not base any of his gay-bashing newsletters on “findings” from a booby trapped study that had loaded up its test group with variables.
To specify what is meant: if a person was raised by a single lesbian mother, who also was paralyzed from the waist down and in a wheelchair, and who was living in poverty, that mother’s child’s “bad” outcomes could as well correlate to the mother’s poverty, or to her being a single disabled mother, as to her being lesbian. When a test group is loaded up with variables, there simply is no way of knowing which of the variables might correlate to — or have caused — the “bad” outcomes.
6) NOM’s BRIAN BROWN IS LYING WHEN HE SAYS HE IS CONCERNED WITH CHILD WELFARE
NOM is interested in political gay-bashing and restricting gay people’s rights, and not in the least in child welfare.
For one example that that is so: most children in the foster care system are there because irresponsible heterosexual parents neglected, abused or abandoned them.
And, many children have been rescued from the foster care system by gay adoptive parents who have given them safe and loving families and homes.
Yet, NOM’s lying anti-gay bigots want those gay-headed families stigmatized and legally disadvantaged — no matter the harm that NOM”s gay-bashing bigotry inflicts on the children the gay parents are raising.
Here is a second example of NOM not giving a damn about child welfare. A 2-year-old boy lost his heterosexual parents to an accident. His gay uncle and the uncle’s male spouse were at the hospital the day the baby was born, and love him very much. His parents had named the married gay uncles as the boy’s guardians, should anything happen to them. Now, that boy is being raised by his loving uncles, instead of having to be placed in an orphanage or in the foster care system.
Who but a malicious anti-gay bigot would say that that boy and his family should be stigmatized and legally disadvantaged?
To read the gay-bashing NOM pledge signed by Mitt Romney that would stigmatize and legally disadvantage that family, go here.
And remember: The National Organization for Marriage recently admitted to guilt in 18 counts of California state campaign finance law violations.
For breaking the law eighteen times, NOM in California had to pay a $49,000 fine.
That NOM authorities have to commission a booby trapped “study” and then promote the booby-trapped study with lie after lie after lie — in their attempts to perpetuate the sexual orientation apartheid system — shows that NOM is losing the argument. Bigots have used distortions of the scientific record as weapons against minorities in the American past, yet all such past American minority victims wound up gaining their civil rights on a national level.
The lying, malicious, campaign-finance-law-breaking anti-gay bigots of NOM will not prevent LGBTers from achieving equality.
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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{ 12 comments }
No worry, once study is slammed by ASA, NOM having paid for it will be sure to make SPLC Hate Group List!
Don't miss this article:
How To Report the National Organization for Marriage As A Hate Group http://pamshouseblend.firedoglake.com/2011/09/29/…
As my friend Alvin McEwen so aptly puts it, "Lies in the name of God are still lies."
It appears the paper has withstood the review called for by critics, and has not been retracted.
"All in all, Sherkat says, his “review of the editorial processing of the [Regnerus study and an accompanying one on the same topic] revealed that there were no gross violations of editorial procedures.”
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/313108/regne…
Seems to me a lot more study on this question needs to be done, and both "sides" ought to drop the hysteria and do the science.
Editorial Misconduct Allegations Filed Against Regnerus’ Editors
Below in this report is an official Complaint presented to COPE – the Committee on Publication Ethics — accusing editors of the journal that published the Regnerus “study” — Social Science Research — of editorial misconduct in publishing the study.
The accused are Social Science Research editor-in-chief James Wright, and editorial board member Darren Sherkat.
The tag-line on COPE’s website’s home page is:
“PROMOTING INTEGRITY IN RESEARCH PUBLICATION.”
COPE Chair Dr. Virginia Barbour has acknowledged receipt of the Complaint. Dr. Barbour confirms that COPE has commenced with COPE’s Complaint processing protocol.
By way of a little background about the scandal, Regnerus’s known minimum total of $785,000 for the study was arranged by The Witherspoon Institute and The Bradley Foundation, where Robert P. George, head of the anti-gay-rights, scientifically disreputable National Organization for Marriage holds positions of authority. Witherspoon president Luis Tellez is a NOM board member.
NOM sponsors hate rallies where its speakers yell through megaphones that homosexuals are “worthy to death,” and NOM officials tell the public that gay people are not human. The Regnerus study currently is being used as an anti-gay-rights political weapon in the 2012 elections.
The Regnerus study was published in the Elsevier journal Social Science Research. After over 200 Ph.D.s and M.D.s sent Social Science Research a letter complaining about the Regnerus study’s lack of intellectual integrity — and the suspicious rush process through which the study got published — SSR editor-in-chief James Wright assigned Sherkat to conduct an “audit” of the publication process for the Regnerus study.
Sherkat admitted in an e-mail exchange with this reporter that his audit was complete and that he found that “The peer review process failed here.” Sherkat went on to say in a subsequent e-mail: “How did this study get through peer review? The peers are right wing Christianists!”
The proper action for the Social Science Research editorial board now to take with respect to the Regnerus study, would be that of retracting the Regnerus study from publication, putting it through genuine professional peer review and proper revisions, and only then publishing it, if it is even found to be publishable.
How any sociology study with an invalid test-group/control-group comparison could ever be deemed valid remains an unexplained mystery.
Out of dozens of experts interviewed by this reporter over the course of six weeks now, not a single one has said that a study with an invalid test-group/control-group comparison could imaginably be considered valid.
And, this much is additionally certain; leaving a study in publication after its peer review is documented as having failed, violates all ethics of scientific publishing.
Moreover, I have interviewed twelve editors of top science journals; all said that genuine professional peer review is a sine qua non of scientific publishing.
For example, Vanderbilt University Sociologist Tony N. Brown, Editor of the American Sociological Association’s American Sociological Review, told me: “journal editors should always seek knowledgeable reviewers who do not have any conflict of interest regarding the submitted author or the study’s funder.” (Bolding added).
The NOM-linked funders and their proxies, including NOM’s Maggie Gallagher, trumpet the alleged “peer review” of Regnerus study as proof of its validity. Therefore, it is all the more urgent that the study — which was published only through an unprofessional peer review process — be retracted and put through genuine, professional peer review before it is again presented to the public as a bona fide scientific effort.
Bona fide — Latin for “good faith.” The Regnerus study in its current iteration, as well as the circumstance of its publication in its current iteration, do not reflect bona fide scientific efforts.
James Wright, Darren Sherkat, their journal Social Science Research and the entire SSR editorial board continue to benefit from Regnerus’s invalid study remaining in publication. Because Regnerus’s invalid study is being so heavily downloaded and cited by political gay-bashers — including SPLC-certified anti-gay hate groups – Social Science Research‘s “impact factor” — a measure of a scientific journal’s influence — continues to be elevated, counter to all truly ethical scientific publishing practice.
The LGBT community nationally, and internationally, absolutely must not passively accept being victimized by an invalid study that only got published through James Wright’s abject abdication of his ethical responsibilities as a science journal’s editor-in-chief.
Interviewed by the Chronicle of Higher Education, Wright admitted that the prospect of exceptionally heavy, gay-bashing-bigots-led “enormous interest” in the invalid Regnerus study got him “excited,” and that his excitement may have caused him to be “inattentive” to things he should have “kept a keener eye on” — for example, whether Regnerus’s test-group/control-group comparison was valid.
I repeat that it is urgently important that the LGBT community not passively accept James Wright’s irresponsible behavior and Sherkat’s bogus excuses for Wright’s irresponsible, dangerous behavior. People wondering how Sherkat could have found all of these peer review and publication failures, and yet in the end, let SSR’s James Wright off the hook of all accountability for publication of the invalid, defamatory Regnerus study, might consider asking how much Wright/SSR paid Sherkat to carry out the audit.
NOM-linked funders appear to have orchestrated most of this entire scandal; we must not roll over and play dead in the face of it. We must not sit passively by as the lying anti-gay bigot Maggie Gallagher alleges, untruthfully, that the Regnerus study went through genuine, professional peer review.
The same NOM bigot monsters who plotted to “drive a wedge” and to “fan hostility” between African-Americans and gays must not be allowed a sick victory over basic human decency in the matter of the invalid Regnerus study.
It must be emphasized, and repeated, exactly what Sherkat admits with his audit.
He says that the peer-review process “failed to identify significant, disqualifying problems.” “Disqualifying” means that the study was not, and still is not suitable for publication. Not. Suitable. For. Publication. And Sherkat admits that it was a failure of the peer review process, that disqualifying problems were not identified. Sherkat further admits that the Regnerus study’s peer reviewers failed to identify disqualifying problems because of ideology — (which in this case means that they are prejudiced against gay people) — and because of “inattention” — which means that they did not carry out their duties as peer reviewers responsibly or professionally. Sherkat also admits that the peer reviewers are “not without some connection to Regnerus,” and suggests that those ties influenced their reviews, i.e. they had conflicts of interest that prevented them from carrying out a professional peer review of Regnerus’s study submission. And, editor-in-chief James Wright admits that he knew of conflicts of interest and anti-gay prejudices among the peer reviewers when he chose them. Sherkat further says: “Obviously, the reviewers did not do a good job.” In his analysis of the Regnerus’s study’s scientific failings, furthermore, Sherkat found one scientific failing in particular that should have disqualified the study “immediately” from being considered for publication.
To sum it up, then; 1) the Regnerus “study” is not scientifically valid; 2) the peer reviewers, prejudiced against gay people, had conflicts of interest even beyond their prejudices, and did not carry out their peer reviewers’ duties responsibly or professionally, and 3) they are not experts in the study’s topic.
Let us now take this opportunity to review what Vanderbilt University Sociologist Tony N. Brown, Editor of the American Sociological Association’s American Sociological Review, has to say: “journal editors should always seek knowledgeable reviewers who do not have any conflict of interest regarding the submitted author or the study’s funder.”
Under these acknowledged conditions, it simply is not acceptable that the Regnerus “study” has not been retracted, so that it may be put through authentic professional peer review carried out by appropriate and conscientious professional peer reviewers.
The LGBT community, and those who support its human dignity and rights, must be outraged that Sherkat — as a Social Science Research editorial board member — is concocting ridiculous and unacceptable excuses for unprofessional behavior from the peer reviewers of the Regnerus “study.” Imagine if a surgeon, through 1) laziness; 2) inexperience; 3) unprofessional behavior and; 4) utter disdain for a sexual minority patient, inflicted an injury on a sexual minority patient during an operation. And then imagine that somebody in hospital administration — more concerned with shielding the irresponsible surgeon from true accountability than with the rights of sexual minority patients — invented a CYA excuse for the surgeon’s laziness and lack of appropriate experience.
Sherkat is doing the equivalent, with a study that daily is being used to inflict harm on LGBTers and those who support their rights.
Here is the official Editorial Misconduct Complaint against Social Science Research’s James Wright and Darren Sherkat, submitted to the Committee on Publication Ethics:
Dear Dr. Barbour:
Social Science Research has now completed its internal audit of the circumstances of its June 10, 2012 publication of the University of Texas at Austin’s Mark Regnerus New Family Structures Study.
Social Science Research did not follow due process in its audit; therefore, I am submitting this COPE Code of Ethics violations complaint to COPE, against SSR editor-in-chief James Wright and against SSR editorial board member Darren Sherkat. Please note that the allegations herein contained include allegations that SSR editor-in-chief James Wright — and later, Darren Sherkat — knowingly and deliberately carried through on a corrupt peer review scheme in order to get the Regnerus study published promptly and without any meaningful criticism made of it, and also without any corresponding, glaringly necessary revisions made to the study prior to publication.
For reference, here is one COPE precedent case involving a corruption of a journal’s peer review system: In that case summary, one reads: “Author A has agreed to retract published papers for which they admit to influencing the peer review process and we are planning retraction notices for these.“
For reference, the Regnerus study is here: How different are the adult children of parents who have same-sex relationships? Findings from the New Family Structures Study
Wright and Sherkat are in violation of COPE’s Code of Conduct 1.1, 1.4, 1.6, 1.7 and 1.8.
Both are in violation of additional points of COPE’s Code of Conduct. However, as the complaint filing procedures I received from Natalie Ridgeway advise that my complaint should be not exceed a certain number of words, I am restricting this initial official COPE complaint submissions to matters involving Wright’s and Sherkat’s violations of the aforementioned points of COPE’s Code of Conduct. Upon request, I shall provide further enumerated allegations.
This part of the complaint centers on the fact that in publishing the Regnerus study, Wright enabled a corrupt and unprofessional peer review process.
Towards an understanding of how Wright and Sherkat violated due process, it is necessary first to clarify that the Regnerus study makes no valid comparison between its test group and control group and therefore, the study is not valid. While it is understood that COPE does not “review” content, a minimum background understand of the fact that the Regnerus study is scientifically invalid is necessary. Specifically, Regnerus’s invalid test-group/control-group comparison serves to demonize gay parents, that is to say, it is defamatory of them. Regnerus alleges that his study aimed to answer this question: “Do the children of gay and lesbian parents look comparable to those of their heterosexual counterparts?” To answer that question, Regnerus cherry-picked a control group of young adult children of continuously married heterosexual parents, against which he pitted his test group of young adult children mainly from failed mixed-orientation marriages (i.e. one parent heterosexual, the other a closeted homosexual or lesbian).
Additionally, into his test group of children of (improperly labeled) “lesbian mothers” and/or “gay fathers,” Regnerus threw in persons who had lost a parent to death when 15, or persons who had a single disabled parent never married, et cetera. Whereas Regnerus might have compared children of broken heterosexual homes to his “test” group whose members came from broken homes, he instead made the invalid comparison he did between children of continuously married heterosexual parents and children with a welter and a hodge-podge of domestic background circumstances, and he concluded that child outcomes for gay parents are “different” and “worse” than for heterosexual parents.
In one shockingly defamatory and false “finding,” Regnerus alleges that children of lesbian parents suffer a 23% rate of childhood victimization. Regnerus provided no means of knowing who allegedly abused these children; he asks only if a parent or guardian committed sex abuse against the children. Other of Regnerus’s data is suspect. For example, he asked “Have you ever masturbated?” and 620 respondents between 18 and 39 replied “No.”
As a little further background before getting to the allegations proper; Sherkat is selectively releasing his full audit to publications known in advance to be Regnerus study boosters. For example, he gave a copy of his audit to The Chronicle for Higher Education, which previously had published Christian Smith’s article “An Academic Auto-da-Fe” in which the baseline scientific failings of the Regnerus study are not acknowledged, and in which critics of the Regnerus study are baselessly attacked. Sherkat also gave a copy off his audit to the National Review’s Robert VerBruggen, another Regnerus study booster. Be it noted that VerBruggen has a history of championing distortions of the scientific record that are defamatory of gay people. For reference, you may read about VerBruggen here.
Nonetheless, Sherkat communicated with me for a time after the time he claimed he had completed his audit. Upon request, I shall provide his e-mail exchanges with me. He told me, apropos of his audit of SSR’s publication of the Regnerus study 1) The peer review failed here; 2) How did this study get published through peer review? The peers are right wing Christianists; 3) Sherkat also reported to me that he found a conflict of interest with one of the peer reviewers.
Additional media reports including the one in the Chronicle of Higher Education state that there was more than one peer reviewer with a conflict of interest, including that at least two of them had been a paid consultant for the Regnerus study design. Additionally, three of the peer reviewers are on record as being in opposition to same-sex marriage. Apparently, not a single one of the peer reviewers is an expert in LGBT matters generally and still less in gay parenting in particular. I asked Vanderbilt University Sociologist Tony N. Brown, Editor of the American Sociological Association’s American Sociological Review, what he thought of that situation. He told me: “journal editors should always seek knowledgeable reviewers who do not have any conflict of interest regarding the submitted author or the study’s funder.” (Bolding added).
With that in mind, then:
Here is COPE’s Code of Conduct 1.6. (editors should) maintain the integrity of the academic record;
The integrity of the academic record obviously is not being maintained where a study that makes no valid comparison between a test and a control group is published through corrupt and unprofessional peer review. Where SSR’s audit uncovered the shocking extent of the unprofessional and corrupt peer review through which, only, the Regnerus study was able to be published, a correction should have been applied, that of retracting the study and putting it through genuine peer review and revisions, prior to any eventual re-publishing of the study. That is to say, Wright violated COPE’s Code of Conduct 1.6 when he first enabled a corrupt and unprofessional peer review of the Regnerus study, and then both Wright and Sherkat violated COPE’s Code of Conduct 1.6 when, knowing more in detail about the full extent of the unprofessional and corrupt peer review through which, only, the Regnerus study was able to be published, they abdicated their responsibility to maintain the integrity of the academic record by leaving the invalid Regnerus study in publication.
Irrefutably, Wright and Sherkat are motivated more through a desire to see SSR’s “impact factor” remain abnormally high, than they are through a dedication to “maintaining the integrity of the academic record.”
COPE’s Code of Conduct 1.7. (editors should) preclude business needs from compromising intellectual and ethical standards;
By his own admission, Wright allowed business needs to compromise intellectual and ethical standards. His initial decisions to grease the rails of peer review by assigning non-expert, ethically compromised peer reviewers with known antipathies to gay human beings, so that he could be sure of a brainless and auto-pilot “STAMP OF APPROVAL” on the Regnerus study clearly compromises intellectual and ethical standards. Moreover, Sherkat’s and Wright’s joint campaign to allege that the corrupt peer review is not grounds for retraction of the study — (so that the study could be put through genuine peer review) — very conspicuously is motivated by a desire to see a continuing, abnormally high “impact factor” and not by concern for intellectual and ethical standards.
COPE’s Code of Conduct 1.8. (editors should) always be willing to publish corrections, clarifications, retractions and apologies when needed.
It is obvious that a retraction of the Regnerus study — (so that it can be put through genuine peer review, with LGBT-sciences experts as the peer reviewers, and with none of them having any conflicts of interest) — is not just appropriate, but required if Wright and SSR are to have a good reputation in the scientific community. Wright, moreover, owes an apology to every LGBT person as well as to every heterosexual parent, brother, sister or other relative of LGBTers and all friends and/or associates of LGBTers who support the unconditional equality under law of their LGBT relatives, friends and associates. Wright acted on the greedy basis of his “excitement” over the prospect of an unethically-elevated “impact factor” for his journal, at the expense of all of the above-cited points from COPE’s Code of Ethics.
Please note that anti-gay-rights groups have attempted to use the Regnerus study against gay people’s rights, in the courts. For example, the religious right-wing splinter group, the American College of Pediatrics, filed an amicus brief in the Golinksi-DOMA case, not just based on the invalid Regnerus study, but actually misrepresenting what the Regnerus study says. In reaction, eight major professional organizations including the American Medical Association filed an amicus brief, explaining to the court where the ACP had misrepresented the Regnerus study, and additionally analyzing the Regnerus study itself as scientifically invalid. You might think that Wright and Sherkat would want to retract the Regnerus paper and see it go through genuine peer review, so that Social Science Research is not again exposed in a court of law as a publication without regard for the integrity of the academic record, and without regard for intellectual and ethical standards.
Again, for reference, here is one COPE precedent case involving a corruption of a journal’s peer review system: In that case summary, one reads: “Author A has agreed to retract published papers for which they admit to influencing the peer review process and we are planning retraction notices for these.”
Sincerely,
Scott Rose
“There is insufficient evidence to warrant an investigation,” the university announced in a press release on Aug. 30.
In an Aug. 24 memorandum, University of Texas research integrity officer Robert Peterson stated that “Professor Regnerus did not commit scientific misconduct when designing, executing and reporting the research published in the Social Science Research article.”
“In brief, Mr. Rose believed that the Regnerus research was seriously flawed and inferred that there must be scientific misconduct,” Peterson stated. “However, there is no evidence to support that inference.”
As part of the inquiry, Peterson interviewed both the accuser and the accused and sequestered Regnerus’ research and correspondence, which included four laptops, two desktop computers and 42,000 of his emails.
In addition, to ensure that the inquiry was conducted appropriately and fairly, the university hired Alan Price as an outside, independent consultant. Price served for 17 years in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service’s Office of Research Integrity. There, he and a staff of senior scientists saw, handled and resolved more than 3,000 charges of scientific misconduct, leading Price to state that no one in the U.S., or for that matter, in the world, has more experience in this area than he does.
Read more: http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/university-o….
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