Thursday, December 20, 2012

Fraudulent anti-gay parenting study now used to create link between watching porno, marriage equality support

Mark Regnerus
How is this for a swift attempt to kick the gay community in the face? Not only is Mark Regnerus attempting to use his fraudulent study on gay parenting to attack same-sex families, but apparently he is now attempting to create a link between pornography and marriage equality support from information taken from the same study:

There is a correlation between watching porn and support for gay marriage among men, Dr. Mark Regnerus, associate professor of sociology at University of Texas at Austin, found. Exposure to diverse and graphic sex acts, he believes, may undermine a traditional view of marriage. Using data from The New Family Structures Study, a project for which he was the principal investigator, Regnerus found statistically significant positive correlation between porn use and support for same-sex marriage among men, even after controlling for other predictors, such as political party, religiosity, marital status, age, education and sexual orientation. In the full sample, 42 percent of men and 47 percent of women agreed or strongly agreed that gay marriage should be legal. Among men who view porn daily or almost daily, though, 54 percent strongly agreed (not just agreed) that gay marriage should be legal while only 13 percent who said they viewed porn monthly or less believed the same, Regnerus wrote for The Witherspoon Institute's "Public Discourse." 

Wasn't that flawed study - which received much deserved criticism - about same-sex parenting? Just how in the world did the porn factor come in?

I almost can't wait to hear what "negative" factor involving marriage equality Regnerus' study conveniently finds.

Hat tip to an anonymous Facebook buddy who pointed this out to me.

8 comments:

Jim Elliott said...

So his "study" shows that people who are not uptight (i.e. they watch porn) are more likely to have a liberal view point on equal marriage?

Anonymous said...

Well, look at the silver lining. The biggest porn consumers in the U.S. are in the Bible Belt. So we can expect their support sooner than later.

Unknown said...

Is anyone really surprised to find that people who are willing to admit they watch porn are more likely to support equal rights and that people who are too ashamed to admit they watch porn oppose our rights?

As long as we're on the subject wasn't their a study done years ago on how much pornogrphy gets purchased in each state that found the family values loving red states to be the leaders? I remember a lot of giggling about Utah being at the top.

Anonymous said...

A quack AND a closet case. He's a fundie's wet dream.

Anonymous said...

The Regnerus study itself wasn't fraudulent - he didn't falsify any data. The problem with the study is that it didn't answer the question he set out to ask, but anti-gay groups pretended it did.

Gregory Peterson said...

My comment to my favorite suit and tie hater group, Christianity Today. I wonder if they'll delete it or not. They're sometimes quite touchy.

http://blog.christianitytoday.com/ctliveblog/archives/2012/12/porn-predicts-same-sex-marriage-support-says-regnerus.html

I've also enjoyed sparring with the posters on the Christian Post article. I'm the one on the tiny Victorian railroad engine.
http://www.christianpost.com/news/porn-use-linked-to-gay-marriage-support-researcher-finds-87008/#Mo8590vS0SJcu1xE.99

To CT:

I believe that the Witherspoon Institute, of which the Public Discourse is their blog, also heavily funded Professor Regnerus.

I have a Witherspoon Institute book, "The Meaning of Marriage: Family, State, Market, and Morals" by by Robert P. George & Jean Bethke Elshtain, editors. 2006.

In the essay, "Soft Despotism and Same Sex Marriage" by Seana Sugrue, she stoops to the lowest levels of academic sounding invective to call Gay couples who adopt "parasitic."

Right...it's a well known trait of parasites to use considerable time. attention and resources to raise non-biological offspring to adulthood.

Professor Sugrue doesn't seem to realize (I hope) that in her zeal to defend heterosexual privilege, she appears to me to be defending THE privileged against the "soft despotism" of minority rights...any and all minorities not in privileged positions.

I think her essay told me pretty much all I needed to know about Professor Sugrue, the editors of the book and the Witherspoon Institute.

As to Professor Regnerus... I love how he properly says "Of course, correlation doesn’t mean causation, and I’m not suggesting causation here," then he does just exactly that in the next breath, all but announces a correlation that means causation.

My credentials in sociology are very modest, a long ago B Sc that I thought would help me as an artist (it has), but I do remember that there is such a thing as a "false correlation." While I can't expound on that without funding a study and running a multiple regression analysis or something myself, which I can't afford, I suspect that there is no causal arrow there; that it is a false correlation.

TomTallis said...

The fraud comes in because he has continually misrepresented his relationship with the funders of the study. This wasn't an academic study, it was a hatchet job for hire.

TomTallis said...

The dishonesty comes from Regnerus's lying and misrepresenting his relationship with NOM, the Witherspoon Institute, and Robert George, all of whom were instrumental in getting his "study" funded.

This wasn't an academic study, it was a hatchet job for hire.