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| Regnerus |
As it turns out, they were all well compensated. According to LGBTQNation:
The state of Michigan says it has spent $40,000 on witnesses who testified as experts at a recent trial on same-sex marriage. The state has paid $39,478.75 to experts, and some additional bills “have not yet been sent in,” Joy Yearout, a spokeswoman for Attorney General Bill Schuette, told The Associated Press.
Let's put Michigan's waste of $40,000 in a larger perspective.
Regnerus had already received $90,000 from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and $695,000 from the Witherspoon Institute to fund his now discredited study on gay parenting. The study was an attempt to sway the Supreme Court in the DOMA and Prop 8 cases and it failed miserably.
Regnerus continued to say that his work was
objective, but according to the Huffington Post and the American Independent:. . . documents, recently obtained through public-records requests by The American Independent and published in collaboration with The Huffington Post, show that the Witherspoon Institute recruited a professor from a major university to carry out a study that was designed to manipulate public policy. In communicating with donors about the research project, Witherspoon’s president clearly expected results unfavorable to the gay-marriage movement. The think tank’s efforts paid off. The New Family Structures Study came out just in time for opponents of gay marriage to cite it in multiple federal cases involving marriage equality – including two cases soon to be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Speaking of which, Speaker of the House John Boehner spent $2.3 million of taxpayers' money in the failed attempt to defend DOMA. Of course this is the same man who won't help pass a bill giving unemployment benefits to Americans out of work, but that's another "pot of potatoes."
