On the phone, Mark Regnerus sounds a little shellshocked. Professional sociologists hardly ever sound shellshocked.
“I knew it would be controversial,” he says. “But this is worse than I ever could have imagined.”
It refers to a scholarly paper Regnerus published last month. This is the hell that broke loose as a result.
Regnerus is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Texas. His paper, appearing in the journal Social Science Research, carried the title “How different are the adult children of parents who have same-sex relationships? Findings from the New Family Structures Study,” which is not a lapel-grabber. The subject was “gay parenting.”
This is a must-read. Shocking but not surprising. --TS
I treat all sociological research as bunk until there's compelling evidence in the other direction.
I'm not in the least surprised that they want to burn the heretic.
At least his work shows that so few people have been raised in homosexual families that it must be preposterous - or even dishonest - for anyone to claim that there's meaningful evidence that it has done no harm.
Posted by: dearieme | July 29, 2012 at 07:19 PM
This study reminds me a bit of John Lott's gun research. Before Lott, the conventional wisdom was that gun control reduced crime. Lott's research found the opposite. Everybody jumped on Lott, and indeed his work was flawed. But at the end of the day, people weren't saying gun control reduced crime; they were saying you couldn't detect an effect either way due to data limitations. To kill Lott's conclusion, they had to kill all the liberal previous research too, as being even worse.
Posted by: Eric Rasmusen | July 29, 2012 at 10:42 PM