There is a lot of shock and anger that the rather flawed social science produced by Mark Regnerus “proving” that gay parents are bad parents got published in a respectable social-science journal. Social Science Research is now being asked to explain how this work was rushed through in record time and why the outside reviewers didn’t balk at the clear ideological biases of both the research design and its spurious conclusions or, if the reviewers did balk, why their concerns were not taken into account and the article revised. A colleague tells me about a letter that is circulating demanding the journal explain itself. I agree with the sentiment, but remain pessimistic about the future of social science.
I am not one who believes that social science can ever truly manage some objective point of view via some supposedly flawless methodology. Many people in mainstream sociology actually believe that a large enough data set or a complex-enough regression analysis will magically afford them some sort of Archimedean viewpoint from which they can view the social world unencumbered by their own location in it. But they cannot escape to a bird’s-eye view of the social world anymore than I can. At best, they can only acknowledge that they have a point of view, an agenda, a set of beliefs and that this is in fact what motivated their research.
It is the fantasy that methodological rigor will result in objective analysis that distracts us from Regnerus’s highly conservative agenda. But really we should not be surprised that conservative sociologists can produce highly flawed conclusions from highly flawed data and get the press to write about it as if it is true because it is statistically significant. It’s also why Social Science Research seems to have let things like large data sets outweigh poor research design and even shakier analysis. After all, that’s the problem with fetishizing numbers as if they are somehow more true and more real than “soft data” like interviews and textual analysis.
But what really and truly disturbs me about Regnerus’s research is not just that it exists and that it will surely be used to show that gay parents produce offspring who are more of a mess than those of straight parents, but it will be used in countless unexpected ways to try to keep gays and lesbians from getting anywhere near children since they are now being spun as “dangers to the family.” In other words, gays are once again being imagined as lurking, dangerous figures who will destroy innocent children by infecting them with their evil ways.
For instance, one of the statistically significant findings being touted among religious conservatives is that the children of homosexuals are not just more likely to be unhappy (e.g. contemplate suicide), but also more likely to be sexually abused. Interestingly, the link isn’t directly between gay men and child sexual abuse (the way in which it has been in the past), but between lesbians and child sexual abuse. Over at Life Site News, we are told that
One of the most remarkable findings was that 23% of those with a lesbian mother reported having been touched sexually by a parent or adult, compared to 2% of those raised in an intact biological family. The percentage was 6% among those with a gay father and 10% with a single parent. In another striking statistic, 31% of those raised by a lesbian mother, and 25% of those raised by a gay father, reported being forced to have sex against their will at some point, compared to just 8% of those raised by their biological parents.
Continuing the homos-are-sexual-predators discourse, Peter LaBarbara, of Americans for Truth about Homosexuality, argues that the research provides “very tragic data” that shows gays should not be allowed to have children since
you’re more likely basically to get molested in a household led by two lesbians.
Is Regnerus or any of the other “experts” on gay families going to point out that this sort of data might be telling us about what happened in the heterosexual families of origin into which these now adult children were born? No, because as Patrick Fagan, director of the Marriage and Religion Institute of the (uber-conservative) Family Research Council, argues, this research is now the “gold standard” of research on the children of gays and lesbians and
It has essentially supplanted all the other prior research because none of them come close to it for national representativeness.
So there you have it. Gays and lesbians are not just bad parents, but sexual predators as well. They should not be allowed to adopt nor reproduce. Objective social science proves it.
Actually what all this “objective” social science about gay parents really proves is that any research that pretends to have no relationship to the researcher is, by definition, junk science and the only place for it is the dustbin. Sadly, this particular junk science will live a long life in court cases and adoption agencies, fertility clinics and legislatures, and anywhere else where gay citizens are seeking full inclusion into the family.