Science Lies Bleeding

‘It’s Time for Mark Regnerus to Get Collectively Dumped,” read the headline to a New Republic blog post in response to a study released earlier this summer by Regnerus, a professor in the department of sociology and at the Population Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. His crime? Doing research on the effects of same-sex parenting on children. The shamelessness of the blogospheric eruption turned into an outrage when an activist in New York wrote to the university to accuse Regnerus of “using misinformation in an attempt to hurt others,” prompting an ethics investigation.  

Any fair-minded reader of Regnerus’s work would probably have the impression not that he wants to hurt people but that he’s concerned about the state of the family and our lives. As a social scientist, he looks at the evidence. His New Family Structures Study, while supported and welcomed by advocates of traditional marriage, wasn’t exactly made to order. While the findings suggest that young-adult children of parents who have been involved in same-sex relationships may have a heightened susceptibility to emotional and social problems, Regnerus himself emphasized that the “political take-home message of the NFSS study is unclear.”
“On the one hand, the instability detected in the NFSS could translate into a call for extending the relative security afforded by marriage to gay and lesbian couples. On the other hand, it may suggest that the household instability that the NFSS reveals is just too common among same-sex couples to take the social gamble of spending significant political and economic capital to esteem and support this new (but tiny) family form while Americans continue to flee the stable, two-parent biological married model, the far more common and accomplished workhorse of the American household, and still — according to the data, at least — the safest place for a kid.” Sounds more like a scientist than an activist.

Read more: http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/310183/science-lies-bleeding-kathryn-jean-lopez