Free Republic

Ask any random group of ten elderly couples about their marriage, and half of them will probably say something like this: “We were high school sweethearts, tied the knot soon after graduation, worked our way up from nothing, had kids, and here we are. Being married made us who we are today.” Beneath these stories is a view of marriage as a foundation of life, a starting point for other goals. Today, this view has been replaced by a different one, what some call the “capstone” view of marriage. In the “capstone” view, marriage is a finishing touch to add...

After years of back and forth, a highly cited paper that appeared to show that gay people who live in areas where people were highly prejudiced against them had a significantly shorter life expectancy has been retracted. The paper, “Structural stigma and all-cause mortality in sexual minority populations,” was published in 2014 by Mark Hatzenbuehler of Columbia University and colleagues. As we reported last year, Mark Regnerus, of the University of Texas at Austin, published a paper describing his failed attempts to replicate the study in 2016: "After Regnerus’s study, Hatzenbuehler hired a colleague at Columbia, Katherine Keyes, to try...

One of music artist John Mayer's signature songs is “Daughters,” a sweet and simple tribute to the importance of parents' influence on their little girls. Here's the refrain: “So fathers, be good to your daughters, Daughters will love like you do. Girls become lovers who turn into mothers, So mothers, be good to your daughters too.” But when John Mayer isn't crooning about your beautiful daughters, he's looking at naked pictures of them, sometimes hundreds at a time before he gets out of bed in the morning. In fact, he often prefers that to an actual human being, according to...

This month yielded yet another published study — which received positive media attention — based on the National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study. The NLLFS is about to enter its third decade of following the same 78 respondents, who were “planned” and born to lesbian mothers employing artificial reproductive technology; in nearly all the families studied, the children were being raised by their biological mother and her partner. While any sociologist worth his or her degree can appreciate the laborious task of keeping track of and reinterviewing the same group of people over many years, this particular data-collection effort probably...

Sociologist Mark Regnerus, whose study on gay parenting outraged gay-rights advocates and their cheerleaders in the academy, started classes at the University of Texas in Austin with, he says, a bit of a load off his shoulders. A university inquiry cleared him of charges of flawed scholarship. Or as gay activists and their many supporters in academia saw it -- that he'd engaged in some very calculated and vile gay-bashing. Specifically, Regnerus was charged with "scientific misconduct" for his study in the July issue of Social Science Research, titled: "How different are the adult children of parents who have same-sex...

The University of Texas at Austin announced Wednesday that a sociologist who has been excoriated by some in the media over a study showing that parents’ homosexual relationships can have negative effects on children is innocent of academic misconduct Dr. Mark Regnerus made headlines in June, when his study was published in the widely respected journal Social Science Research. According to his findings, children raised by homosexual parents are more likely than those raised by married heterosexual parents to suffer from poor impulse control, depression and suicidal thoughts, require mental health therapy; identify themselves as homosexual; choose cohabitation; be unfaithful...

‘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 inquiry.  Any fair-minded reader...

Two new peer-reviewed studies show that family structure matters and children do best when reared by their married biological mother and father. The widely circulated claim that parents engaged in same-sex relationships do just as well as other parents at raising children—a claim widely known today as the “no differences” thesis—is not settled science. Two new peer-reviewed studies released this week by the academic journal Social Science Research challenge the claim that there are no differences in outcomes between children raised by parents who have same-sex relationships and those raised by their biological mother and father in intact, stable marriages.In...

Judges and justices who reasoned in favor of same-sex marriage based on social scientists' "no differences" thesis must now contend with better research: Heterosexual married couples offer the best family structure for children, according to a new, rigorously researched sociological study. A notable feature of the legal debate over same-sex marriage in the United States in recent years has been the employment of social science research on the family as evidence. In courts of law across the country, advocates of same-sex marriage have advanced the “no differences” thesis—the view that having gay or lesbian parents makes “no difference” in the...

I am a Canadian economist who has worked on family issues in Canada and the U.S. for the past 26 years. Although I’ve mostly studied matters of divorce, custody, child support, and the general institution of marriage, for the past few years I’ve been working on series of empirical projects related to same-sex marriage. I’ve been using a special data set in Canada that is large (over 300,000 individuals) and random (with weights), that directly identifies sexual orientation, and that was designed by Statistics Canada. In the process of working on same-sex marriage I have read almost every study...

Two studies released Sunday may act like brakes on popular social-science assertions that gay parents are the same as — or maybe better than — married mother-father parents. "The empirical claim that no notable differences exist must go," University of Texas sociology professor Mark Regnerus said in his study in Social Science Research. Using a "gold standard" data set of nearly 3,000 randomly selected American young adults, Mr. Regnerus looked at their lives on 40 measures of social, emotional and relationship outcomes. He found that, when compared with adults raised in married, mother-father families, adults raised by lesbian mothers had...