Defending against the “apples to oranges” charge, it states on page 25: “First, ‘if stability is a key asset for households with children, then it is sensible to use intact biological families in any comparative assessment.’ Id. at 1368. Indeed, part of the problem of nearly all previous studies is that they seldom included a married biological family control group.”

A control group isn’t supposed to be a “gold standard.” A control group is supposed to be as close to identical as possible to the experimental group, except in the variable that’s being tested.

This is basic, high school science stuff, and these guys don’t seem to get it.

Naturally, this is presented in the most unflattering light possible but as far as I can see (and I’ve only skimmed it), it doesn’t actually lie about the Regnerus study the way NOM is doing.

Response to Regnerus springs to mind:

“How do you like those apples and oranges?”

Interesting choice of analogy. Choose a group from the normative tradition of western societies and you’d most likely find outcomes consistent with normative western societies. Choose from the non-normative tradition of same sex couples, however self-selecting the methodology, a group that has been told at times they are inherently disposed to child abuse, that having the children is intrinically abusive, a group that has their rights proscribed and prescribed for millenia, a group without wide poltical support until very recently, who are very often estranged from wider support networks such as family and church etc. then you find child outcomes as good if not better than their heterosexuals peers? Now that is truly a sociological study worth doing For the first time, no one can say homosexuals ‘can’t’ bring up kids, they can only say, ‘some’ homosexuals can bring up kids. Nevertheless it is a radical finding, unlike your study which suffers terribly from confirmation bias (what, you didn’t go looking for that outcome? Yur funders thought they would find LBGT parents are just as good? Don’t even go there).

You need to realise – nothing is in a vacuum “I will stick by the data, and offer plausible interpretations of it, together with spelling out its limits.”

No-one is listening to the interpretations limitations. And they won’t listen until you speak out louder.

“I’m not helping out that effort, dude.”

Intellectual abdication, nothing less. Own it.

They will be taking the Regnerus research head on and and declaring to the Court that there is NO DIFFERENCE in the outcomes for children between opposite sex parents and same sex parents.

One other point, Regnerus himself misrepresents his research, he claimed unequivocally that opposite sex parents are the “Gold Standard” of parenting. He lies, his research never found nor did he study same sex couples who had planned children together. He can NOT claim a Gold Standard when he did NOT compare children who were raised all their lives by their same sex parents to opposite sex parents similarly situated. Here read his “Gold Standard” quote here-

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/302455/mom-and-dad-make-difference-kathryn-jean-lopez

If anyone here understands German and wants to listen http://tvthek.orf.at/programs/1279-Im-Zentrum/episodes/5466637-im-ZENTRUM/5479441-im-ZENTRUM

The direct link will probaly not work but you can use the search field on top of the page to search for “Im Zentrum”.

The reason for the discussion was a recent deciscion of the European Human Rights Court (X and others v. Austria).

Watch if you want to be depressed…

http://iranianredneck.wordpress.com/2012/12/05/social-science-research-research-ethics-and-the-same-sex-marriage-debate/

Youtube video link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=VdVR2DVU5sY&list=PL6Lxn67PclQHjhgT5VFu11u8GMW3FlgAU

Here is the link – my comment is first followed by both Regnerus and Yancey in high dudgeon:

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/blackwhiteandgray/2012/11/when-data-go-bad/

Jimmy Green says:
November 12, 2012 at 1:47 pm

You are not doing yourself any favors by continuing to misrepresent the findings of your study. As you have admitted in respeonse to SSRJ’s commissioned audit and in mainstream media interviews, your sample group was not “children of gay parents” but children that self-reported one of their parents having had a same sex encounter at any point in their life. However, when addressing conservative audiences, you drop the nuance and make inaccurate comparisons to gay people for what seems to be political, not scientific, purposes. The way you continually frame your project as somehow invalidating decades of previous research by “liberal” sociologists, with the implicit suggestion that there is some all powerful gay conspiracy that has corrupted the science, is transparent to anyone who does not share your a priori religious conviction that gay people are “intrinsically disorderd” and thus their children must be tainted as well.

If you really want to prove you that you had no political intent in this matter, you would stop giving interviews to Focus on the Family and other anti-gay political groups, as well as publically disclaim the use of your work in amicus briefs in same-sex litigation. Prior researchers, like Lisa Diamond and Carol Gilligan, have publically condemned and even given depositions in response to right wing groups distorting their research. You said in your Slate piece that you did not believe your research should be used to deny gay people the right to marry but that it has already been cited in ongoing litigation concerning DOMA and same-sex marriage, along with being cited in every right wing article or blog post that describe gay people in the most disturbing ways, specifically the slander about child abuse.

Many people believe this is what you intended from the start and I don’t see much evidence to disprove that assumption.

Mark Regnerus says:
November 12, 2012 at 3:26 pm
Jimmy,

I’m not looking to do myself favors, friend. In this blog post, I’m calling out a long-cited dataset for some significant problems. To be sure, the NFSS has limitations, ones that I’ve admitted. If organizations to whom I’ve given interviews have glossed over those limitations, they do so in spite of my selected words. While other scholars may leap to squash the possible interpretations that people make of their data analyses, I tend not to do that, not for Focus on the Family nor for the Human Rights Campaign, or anyone in between. If a media organization is interested in laying out the complexities of the data, I am open to talking with them. Most, however, have been looking to conduct a hatchet job. I’m not helping out that effort, dude. Finally, I don’t pay much attention to who all is talking about the study, and what they’re saying. (I have a day job that requires attention.) People may believe about me what they wish; they are free to. I will stick by the data, and offer plausible interpretations of it, together with spelling out its limits. Friends and enemies can attest to that. Moreover, I have made the data public–uploaded it to the ICPSR data repository at the University of Michigan in early October. The NLLFS is not public data; never has been, after 20+ years. You are free to wonder what’s going on inside my head (and perhaps wrestle over whether that should even matter) but making data public is a scientific value/principle.

Mark