About That Gay Parenting Study

Oh, brother. Let's see how this turns out.

A University of Texas sociologist is being investigated for scientific “misconduct,” after angering gay activists with research suggesting children raised by same-sex couples have more problems as adults.

That's the big study that got headlines a few weeks ago because it calls into question all the minor studies suggesting that kids of gay parents are no different than kids of heterosexual parents. Questions about its research methods have been raised. 

We'll have to see if the study really is in some way fraudulent or this is a PC investigation. It smacks of the latter. 

A July 11 article in the Austin American-Statesman indicated that one of Regnerus' fiercest critics, Scott Rosensweig of the “New Civil Rights Movement” blog, may have played a leading role in the university's decision to investigate.
The blogger, who writes for the gay activist site under the name “Scott Rose,” accused Regnerus of ethical violations in a June 21 letter to University of Texas President Bill Powers.
Rosensweig told the president that Regnerus' study was “designed so as to be guaranteed to make gay people look bad, through means plainly fraudulent and defamatory.”He also claimed that Regnerus, who got funding from the Witherspoon Institute and the Bradley Foundation for his work, had done the research with “money from an anti-gay political organization.”

Mark Regnerus, the sociologist in question, in a series of interviews and blog posts, has defended against most of the criticisms already:

“I had no idea what the data would reveal,” he said, “but it's revealed far greater instability in the households of parents who've had same-sex relationships.”
His findings, he said, should be evaluated by the standards of “normal science,” not ideology. He described the criticisms being leveled as “disproportionate to the study's limitations,” which could be legitimately critiqued.
Regnerus addressed other criticisms in a series of blog posts that accompanied the publication of his findings. The conservative Witherspoon Institute, he said, “had nothing to do with the study design, or with the data analyses, or interpretations, or the publication of the study.”
The sociologist also said his Catholic beliefs did not compromise the research. “There’s no 'Christian' approach to sampling or 'Catholic' way of crunching numbers,” he remarked.

“Any trained methodologist, data manager, and statistician can locate the same patterns I reported. Others may ask different questions, or follow different decision rules on measures. But that’s normal science.”

Puzzling to me is, in spite of the crowing from the usual groups in defense of marriage, I'm not sure the study actually tells us anything about gay parenting qua gay. It says a lot about unstable households. It's a devastating critique of unwed parenting, divorce, and the comings and goings of partners as all very bad for children (for this we needed a study?). But I would think the gay groups would take that as an argument for gay marriage: "we're only unstable because you won't let us marry." Not an argument I buy, but the one I would predict.

(Oh, see. I googled it and sho' 'nuf, here's that argument from Will Saletan in Slate. Good piece in a way, though I disagree with it.)