This is from last month. His study supposes populations can be extrapolated from a sample of 60-something people.

It's statistical bullshiat.

Why would we want scientists to teach actual science when they can teach pseudoscience?

gilgigamesh: The project was led by Mark Regnerus, a sociologist at the University of Texas known for attention-grabbing research that sometimes seems to tack along the narratives of social conservatives seeking to roll back the sexual revolution. A former professor at the evangelical Calvin College, Regnerus wrote a cover story for Christianity Today arguing that Christians should encourage their children to marry young; he also wrote a piece for Slate arguing that the sexual revolution has produced bitter fruit for women. (Both were based on research published in his books.) Regnerus's same-sex-parenting study was funded, at a price tag of three-quarters of a million dollars-an enormous sum in social science-by two socially conservative groups: the Witherspoon Institute and the Bradley Foundation.

Seems legit.

How did the department chair and the dean even hire this guy?

Ctrl+F "fire"

0 of 0

Observation: In the 50s, children of white parents had better lives than children of black parents.

Conclusion: White people make better parents.

And wtf is a "political denialist"?

Really if the nimrods protesting the article or most of the dimwits here read it the point he makes in the research is this: stable parents and families are > than unstable parents and families. The reason gay parents are "worse" in the study is that they tend to be more unstable in relationships but a lot of that has nothing to do with their being gay. He even suggests that this research might make a case FOR gay marriage. His methodology isn't off the nut in fact if you compare what he did with most of the current gay/straight parent literature it is a massive step forward. The sound bite from the research is a lot more "provacative" than the actual conclusions.

/Atheist
//Pro Gay Marriage
///Pro actually reading scholarship not reading incompetent summaries by fools

Whoa! Will Wheaton got gay married?

UNC_Samurai: gilgigamesh: The project was led by Mark Regnerus, a sociologist at the University of Texas known for attention-grabbing research that sometimes seems to tack along the narratives of social conservatives seeking to roll back the sexual revolution. A former professor at the evangelical Calvin College, Regnerus wrote a cover story for Christianity Today arguing that Christians should encourage their children to marry young; he also wrote a piece for Slate arguing that the sexual revolution has produced bitter fruit for women. (Both were based on research published in his books.) Regnerus's same-sex-parenting study was funded, at a price tag of three-quarters of a million dollars-an enormous sum in social science-by two socially conservative groups: the Witherspoon Institute and the Bradley Foundation.

Seems legit.

How did the department chair and the dean even hire this guy?

He mu$t have $hown up with $ome $erious credential$

Benevolent Misanthrope: a closer look at the study's limited scope, not to mention its obvious methodological weaknesses, suggests it won't move the debate on gay parenthood very much.

Of course it will. Those fundie farktards will use it like there's no farkigng tomorrow and they'll be the ones screaming loudest. No one cares about statistically valid samples and science. they care that some guy with letters after his name said what they want to hear. The. End.

And Christians wonder why so very many of us think of all of them as a bunch of semi-literate f*ckwits.

Exactly. And because most of the people they argue either won't recognize the study from how they describe it, won't have heard about its debunking because the media has only run with the claim and not the response to it, or won't be in a position to check out the claim, they'll respond with "that may be, but.." Even talking about it in the future tense is too confident; all you need to do is look at the previous fark threads on the issues to see folks responded that way from the get go.

Benevolent Misanthrope: a closer look at the study's limited scope, not to mention its obvious methodological weaknesses, suggests it won't move the debate on gay parenthood very much.

Of course it will. Those fundie farktards will use it like there's no farkigng tomorrow and they'll be the ones screaming loudest. No one cares about statistically valid samples and science. they care that some guy with letters after his name said what they want to hear. The. End.

And Christians wonder why so very many of us think of all of them as a bunch of semi-literate f*ckwits.

Many of these same people will claim that scientists studying climate change are lying or distorting the truth in order to get funding. I want to hear what kind of excuses they'll come up with if you apply that logic to this guy.

There is nothing wrong with doing objective science, ever. If a thorough and well-thought study ever did come out that suggested children of gay partnerships were at a disadvantage, then that would be a fact we would have to deal with. It still wouldn't justify rolling back gay rights, but perhaps it would be something we would need to show compensatory awareness toward.

This study, however, is horribly flawed, unless the article is unjustly describing it. It's pretty damning to only compare broken gay homes with nuclear families with the biological parents still married. How often does that happen these days? 40% of the time? I promise you, even if children of gay partnerships aren't as advantaged as children of married hetero couples, they are definitely better off than children of single parents.

If I tried to get my supervisors to submit that kind of methodologically sloppy bullsh*t for publication, they'd fire my ass without question. I'm in the social sciences, and the projects I'm a part of spend months trying to design a study and sometimes years collecting and analyzing data in the most rigorous and justifiable way possible. This kind of stuff, though, is just goofy.

But, hey, it's a great lesson in the flaws of the peer-review process and I would recommend this study to undergraduate Research Methods professors as a way to make salient topics like methodological rigor, appropriate statistical analysis, interpretation of results, and, more importantly, that you cannot trust a study simply because it got published; you need to read through it and critically evaluate every journal article you read.

In questionnaires filled out between 1971 and 1994, the study asked 15,000 18- to 49-year-olds if either of their parents had ever been in a same-sex relationship.

Holy-old-data Batman! This type of survey at this point in time is going to uncover a lot of gay individuals who were likely also in a STRAIGHT marriage (because of kids) and because the kids KNEW about the gay relationship it is likely a family impacted by a divorce. Add in the fact that life kind of sucked for gay in the 70s/80s, so I imagine their children were likely to have a hard time. Probably got a lot of kids whose parent died of HIV too. Terrible study!

Tiber727: Many of these same people will claim that scientists studying climate change are lying or distorting the truth in order to get funding.

You do realize that regardless of one's agenda, you don't have to lie to get funding. You don't ask for funding by showing people with money data, you ask for funding by showing people with money a research question. See, that's because getting data is the hard part that requires funding to hire graduate RAs and post-docs and to purchase equipment. So going to a place with money and saying "We have all this data and it says this, so give us money" will get you strange looks from any agency or organizations you go to.

mark12A: Oh noes!! University researcher is committing thoughtcrime! Doubleplus Ungood!!! Schedule Hate Rally immediately!

Gay marriage is a bad idea. It degrades the social institution responsible for producing quality replacement citizens down to the status of a mere social living arrangement.

Sadly, the damage will only become apparent after a generation or two of widespread gay marriage. At which point society will be heavily damaged because a small elite of properly raised and socialized citizens will dominate society, and the broken offspring of dysfunctional social living arrangements will comprise the emerging peasant class.

And no, this has NOTHING to do with homophobia. It's about recklessly screwing around with a social construct that has worked well for generations.

Civil Unions are good enough. Stop trying to leech off of the prestige of the institution of Marriage. It's already getting hard enough to encourage young people to commit the time and resources to forming a stable productive Marriage. We, as a society, NEED their quality offspring.

I wasn't aware sex was a social institution. You should go and tell almost every single species of plant and animal that, so they can stop breeding outside the bounds of your social convention. Also, marriage was originally an economic arrangement for the parents of the couple getting married.

And yea, the "separate but equal" thing worked so well in the past that we really should just keep civil unions.

Mark12A is doing nothing to dispel my negative opinion about people who insist on riding their bicycles on the sidewalks. He defends riding on the sidewalk in all threads related to bicycling. Lately he's been attacking gay marriage in any thread about gays. Both of these opinions are wrong and stupid.

Kome: Tiber727: Many of these same people will claim that scientists studying climate change are lying or distorting the truth in order to get funding.

You do realize that regardless of one's agenda, you don't have to lie to get funding. You don't ask for funding by showing people with money data, you ask for funding by showing people with money a research question. See, that's because getting data is the hard part that requires funding to hire graduate RAs and post-docs and to purchase equipment. So going to a place with money and saying "We have all this data and it says this, so give us money" will get you strange looks from any agency or organizations you go to.

I meant in the sense of 'continued' funding. The conspiracy theory of climate change is that scientists are making up or overstating climate change so that they can get more projects studying its effects, and green energy companies are funding them because without the idea of climate change nobody would buy their products. In this situation, a researcher with a noted bias towards conservatism happens to get funding from conservative organizations to study something they have a vested interest in the answer to. And many of the same people who believe the former would see nothing wrong with the latter, because they share the same conservative bias.

It's not about what I realize; I'm saying people who use certain claims to discredit their opponents always seem to have an excuse when their argument, however flawed, is used in the same way against them.

Tiber727: Kome: Tiber727: Many of these same people will claim that scientists studying climate change are lying or distorting the truth in order to get funding.

You do realize that regardless of one's agenda, you don't have to lie to get funding. You don't ask for funding by showing people with money data, you ask for funding by showing people with money a research question. See, that's because getting data is the hard part that requires funding to hire graduate RAs and post-docs and to purchase equipment. So going to a place with money and saying "We have all this data and it says this, so give us money" will get you strange looks from any agency or organizations you go to.

I meant in the sense of 'continued' funding. The conspiracy theory of climate change is that scientists are making up or overstating climate change so that they can get more projects studying its effects, and green energy companies are funding them because without the idea of climate change nobody would buy their products. In this situation, a researcher with a noted bias towards conservatism happens to get funding from conservative organizations to study something they have a vested interest in the answer to. And many of the same people who believe the former would see nothing wrong with the latter, because they share the same conservative bias.

It's not about what I realize; I'm saying people who use certain claims to discredit their opponents always seem to have an excuse when their argument, however flawed, is used in the same way against them.

thread jacking idiots, both of you.

chuckufarlie: thread jacking idiots, both of you.

Meh, my comment was general enough to apply to the topic in TFA. To extend my point, this guy didn't get funding for his project by saying "I've got all this data that shows kids of gay parents grow up to be messed up" he got funding by saying "I'm investigating whether or not kids who have gay parents grow up differently than kids of straight parents."

At that point, he does his study and interprets his data however he wants and it is up to the scientific community - in this case, developmental psychologists, clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, and sociologists would be the most relevant peers - to say whether or not it holds up to scrutiny. And if they conclude that that interpretation doesn't, well they can do their own research, either replicating his method as faithfully as possible or trying a different method (which would try to establish converging validity) to see if they get the same or different results.

It really is like every other scientific discipline and every other scientific topic. Global warming, evolution, vaccines, etc. A single study means dick all by itself. Different methods conducted by independent researchers approaching the topic from different perspectives gets at the truth (note the small "t" and not the philosophically-loaded capital "T") a lot better. And sometimes unexpected, or quirky, or surprising, or contradictory results lead to more research into a topic so that in 5 or 10 or 50 years, we'll have an even better understanding than we did 5 or 10 or 50 years ago.

So kids from busted-ass families tend to on average produce more farked-up kids? No shiat. If only there wasn't some sort of bizarre mythology-driven motivation to compel people to participate in what become busted-ass families.

Benevolent Misanthrope: UNC_Samurai: gilgigamesh: The project was led by Mark Regnerus, a sociologist at the University of Texas known for attention-grabbing research that sometimes seems to tack along the narratives of social conservatives seeking to roll back the sexual revolution. A former professor at the evangelical Calvin College, Regnerus wrote a cover story for Christianity Today arguing that Christians should encourage their children to marry young; he also wrote a piece for Slate arguing that the sexual revolution has produced bitter fruit for women. (Both were based on research published in his books.) Regnerus's same-sex-parenting study was funded, at a price tag of three-quarters of a million dollars-an enormous sum in social science-by two socially conservative groups: the Witherspoon Institute and the Bradley Foundation.

Seems legit.

How did the department chair and the dean even hire this guy?

University of Texas. Hello.

I don't get what you're saying. That UT-Austin is somehow far-right-wing? The school is known for being a fairly liberal institution, which is why Austin is this weird outpost of blue in a sea of red. And I doubt that there are hard-right leanings in the Sociology Department. If this guy had some sort of shoddy record, then the only thing that would make sense would be the fact that his research is largely self-funding (which, if right-wing think tanks are throwing money at him for his "studies", wouldn't be surprising). But still, if it turns out that this guy's methods are so sloppy, I can't imagine the rest of the department wants to be associated with him.

mark12A: Civil Unions are good enough. Stop trying to leech off of the prestige of the institution of Marriage. It's already getting hard enough to encourage young people to commit the time and resources to forming a stable productive Marriage. We, as a society, NEED their quality offspring.

Jesus had two dads.

He turned out okay.

mark12A: Oh noes!! University researcher is committing thoughtcrime! Doubleplus Ungood!!! Schedule Hate Rally immediately!

Gay marriage is a bad idea. It degrades the social institution responsible for producing quality replacement citizens down to the status of a mere social living arrangement.

Sadly, the damage will only become apparent after a generation or two of widespread gay marriage. At which point society will be heavily damaged because a small elite of properly raised and socialized citizens will dominate society, and the broken offspring of dysfunctional social living arrangements will comprise the emerging peasant class.

And no, this has NOTHING to do with homophobia. It's about recklessly screwing around with a social construct that has worked well for generations.

Civil Unions are good enough. Stop trying to leech off of the prestige of the institution of Marriage. It's already getting hard enough to encourage young people to commit the time and resources to forming a stable productive Marriage. We, as a society, NEED their quality offspring.

You sound concerned.

mark12A: Oh noes!! University researcher is committing thoughtcrime! Doubleplus Ungood!!! Schedule Hate Rally immediately!

Gay marriage is a bad idea. It degrades the social institution responsible for producing quality replacement citizens down to the status of a mere social living arrangement.

Sadly, the damage will only become apparent after a generation or two of widespread gay marriage. At which point society will be heavily damaged because a small elite of properly raised and socialized citizens will dominate society, and the broken offspring of dysfunctional social living arrangements will comprise the emerging peasant class.

And no, this has NOTHING to do with homophobia. It's about recklessly screwing around with a social construct that has worked well for generations.

Civil Unions are good enough. Stop trying to leech off of the prestige of the institution of Marriage. It's already getting hard enough to encourage young people to commit the time and resources to forming a stable productive Marriage. We, as a society, NEED their quality offspring.

I am curious: do you suffer physical discomfort as a consequence of your demonstrable mental incompetence?

Bad parents = bad parenting, Good parents = better parenting, Great parents = even better parenting.

FabulousFreep: Bad parents = bad parenting, Good parents = better parenting, Great parents = even better parenting.

ladies and gentlemen - I give you Rick Romero!!

UNC_Samurai: How did the department chair and the dean even hire this guy?

Did you miss the part about this being in Texas?

Benevolent Misanthrope: a closer look at the study's limited scope, not to mention its obvious methodological weaknesses, suggests it won't move the debate on gay parenthood very much.

Of course it will. Those fundie farktards will use it like there's no farkigng tomorrow and they'll be the ones screaming loudest. No one cares about statistically valid samples and science. they care that some guy with letters after his name said what they want to hear. The. End.

And Christians wonder why so very many of us think of all of them as a bunch of semi-literate f*ckwits.

Well, to be completely fair, the study's sample size is commendable, and the sampling method is not without merit for certain purposes. As others have remarked, the data are not meaningless or unusable, and may provide useful insights about a number of things. Regnarus has, if nothing else, gathered an interesting body of information in a scientific context about a generation that probably deserves such study, as it's rapidly receding into history.

The valid criticism is that the findings *do not* support many of the things that some people are saying (or only implying) that they mean: that children of same-sex parents are more likely to fare worse in the world. The sample included very few 'intact' same-sex couples, due in no small part to the time period it covered (1974-1994 -- roughly, the end of the Vietnam War up to the middle of Clinton's first term in office). This was a period when NO laws protecting such parenting couples, AS parents, existed, even 'intact' ones. Rather, Regnarus sorted his subjects rather crudely into categories based on whether either of their parents had 'ever' had any same-sex 'relationship,' as reported by now-grown children recalling events of decades ago in their youth, perhaps as filtered through the explanations those parents supplied them at the time. (Some of the parents are surely dead by now.)

Regnarus may or may not have been aware of Kinsey and Klein's studies that both suggested that what we like to call 'homsexuality' and 'bisexuality' are a lot more common than polite society likes to acknowledge -- a detail that would inherently frustrate the kind of discretion he seems to aim for in his sorting schema. Perhaps he didn't know (though it's difficult to accept that a self-appointed expert in this area would), or chose to reject or ignore those inconvenient truths, but regardless, it tends to require is to accept his study's paradigms on their own terms, instead of the more complex context of foregoing studies on related subjects.

In short, it's interesting for what it is, and might even prove useful for some purposes, but it offers very little insight into gay parenting as such.

dalbuc: Really if the nimrods protesting the article or most of the dimwits here read it the point he makes in the research is this: stable parents and families are > than unstable parents and families. The reason gay parents are "worse" in the study is that they tend to be more unstable in relationships but a lot of that has nothing to do with their being gay. He even suggests that this research might make a case FOR gay marriage. His methodology isn't off the nut in fact if you compare what he did with most of the current gay/straight parent literature it is a massive step forward. The sound bite from the research is a lot more "provacative" than the actual conclusions.

/Atheist
//Pro Gay Marriage
///Pro actually reading scholarship not reading incompetent summaries by fools

FTFA:

Regnerus says outright that his study could reasonably lead to caution against legalizing gay marriage. It could lead to support for gay marriage to stabilize gay families, he writes, but it "may suggest that the household instability that the [study] 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."

/queer
//pro reading TFA carefully, instead of just skimming it

WorldCitizen: About the only way to do a real study of whether or not gay couples raising kids comes out to be any better or worse than straight couples raising kids will be when the following happens:

1) those couples have equal marriage/family creating/legal rights
2) society evolves enough that the kids won't face constant hell from "pro-family" folks.

Yup.

I'd venture to say that kids from mixed black and white marriages probably have statistically "worse" childhoods than same race couples too. They're already starting their life being bombarded with the idea that there is something wrong with them.

Problems related to the behavior and mentality of other family members, peers, teachers, employers, and the rest of society. Not to mention the emotional issues their parents probably have from being treated poorly due to their decision on who to date, marry, and/or have kids with. That stuff gets pushed onto the kids.

But I don't see many people proclaiming anymore that mixed race couples shouldn't be legally allowed to marry or have children.

Tiber727: Benevolent Misanthrope: a closer look at the study's limited scope, not to mention its obvious methodological weaknesses, suggests it won't move the debate on gay parenthood very much.

Of course it will. Those fundie farktards will use it like there's no farkigng tomorrow and they'll be the ones screaming loudest. No one cares about statistically valid samples and science. they care that some guy with letters after his name said what they want to hear. The. End.

And Christians wonder why so very many of us think of all of them as a bunch of semi-literate f*ckwits.

Many of these same people will claim that scientists studying climate change are lying or distorting the truth in order to get funding. I want to hear what kind of excuses they'll come up with if you apply that logic to this guy.

"Bad Science" is not limited to any one side of the political spectrum.