Conservative social media influencer resurrects decade-old debunked study to bash gay parenting

Michael Knowles

Earlier this week, failed actor and successful conservative social media influencer (which really isn't a stretch from failed actor) Michael Knowles thought he was cooking with the following tweet about gay parenting:

His goal was to prove that gay parenting was not good for children. What he ended up proving was how folks on his side of the spectrum rely on junk science to craft false conclusions.

One source who Knowles refers to as Sullins is Catholic University priest and professor Paul Sullins. He has written papers attacking gay parenting. The flaws in these papers have been pointed out on many occasions. 

In 2016, Nathaniel Frank of The Slate had this to say about his methods:

 . . . Sullins’ most recent study was published in an Egyptian-based open access journal that requires authors to pay for publication, creating a conflict of interest since publishers who ought to perform quality control have a financial incentive to accept papers, regardless of quality. The journal’s publisher has been criticized for a lax peer-review process that isn’t even overseen by a real editor.

. . . In (Sullins; study), he claims “adults raised by same-sex parents were at over twice the risk of depression” developing later in life as those raised by different-sex couples. He calls it the “first study to examine children raised by same-sex parents into early adulthood” and claims it “contribute[s] new information for understanding of the effects of same-sex parenting through the life-course transition into early adulthood.” Except, as with the other studies making similar claims, it does no such thing. Sullins found 20 cases of what he calls “adolescents with same-sex parents.” 

Yet we know nothing about how long these subjects lived with a same-sex couple, much less whether they were “raised” by one. In fact, we know from other research (and common sense, mixed with a dose of history) that the majority of individuals with a gay parent were born into families that were not headed by same-sex parents, but by either single parents or a different-sex couple. Sullins thus has no grounds on which to define his subjects as having been “raised” by “same-sex parents,” which would be essential for his entire anti-LGBTQ claim to make any sense.

The other source Knowles mentioned is a doozy:

Children of LGBT parents fare worse on 77/80 social outcome measures (Regnerus, 2012).

Knowles's citation comes from the 2012 study, New Family Structures Study by University of Texas professor Mark Regnerus. The study made the claim that children in same-sex households suffer immensely.  When published, it naturally caused a firestorm. It came out during what could be seen as the last stages of the gay marriage fights. At the time, the argument was steadily making its way through the courts and those who opposed gay marriage were losing case after case.

That last fact is a very important part to the story.  The Regnerus study was bought and paid for by the opponents of gay marriage in an attempt to gain some momentum.

According to a February 22, 2014 article in The New York Times:

In meetings hosted by the Heritage Foundation in Washington in late 2010, opponents of same-sex marriage discussed the urgent need to generate new studies on family structures and children, according to recent pretrial depositions of two witnesses in the Michigan trial and other participants. One result was the marshaling of $785,000 for a large-scale study by Mark Regnerus, a meeting participant and a sociologist at the University of Texas . . . 

. . . . Among those at the Heritage meetings was Luis E. Tellez, president of the Witherspoon Institute, a religious-conservative research center in Princeton, N.J. His organization seized the baton, signing up Dr. Regnerus, who was known as a skilled quantitative researcher, mainly on adolescent sexuality and religion, and as a Roman Catholic and opponent of same-sex marriage. The institute gave Dr. Regnerus $695,000; the Bradley Foundation, a grant-making organization that supports conservative causes, gave him $90,000, according to his résumé.

When organizations which oppose gay marriage give a professor - who opposes gay marriage himself - over a half a million dollars to create a study about gay parenting, how do you think said study will turn out? The question of bias was raised loudly and extensively by supporters of gay marriage and journalists. 

And the flaws found in the study itself didn't help matters.  The media watchdog site Media Matters for America pointed out five major flaws in Regnerus study including the fact that Regnerus himself admitted that the study did not prove that same-sex parenting caused a negative outcome for children.

How Regnerus defined gay parent was also a major subject of contention.

John Corvino in a June 11, 2012 article in The New Republic:

Question: What do the following all have in common? 

A heterosexually married female prostitute who on rare occasion services women 

A long-term gay couple who adopt special-needs children 

A never-married straight male prison inmate who sometimes seeks sexual release with other male inmates 

A woman who comes out of the closet, divorces her husband, and has a same-sex relationship at age 55, after her children are grown 

Ted Haggard, the disgraced evangelical pastor who was caught having drug fueled-trysts with a male prostitute over a period of several years 

A lesbian who conceives via donor insemination and raises several children with her long-term female partner 

Give up? The answer—assuming that they all have biological or adopted adult children between the ages of 18 and 39—is that they would all be counted as “Lesbian Mothers” or “Gay Fathers” in Mark Regnerus’s new study, “How different are the adult children of parents who have same-sex relationships? Findings from the New Family Structures Study” (NFSS).

From CBS News on June 12, 2012:

"Whether same-sex parenting causes the observed differences cannot be determined from Regnerus' descriptive analysis," said Cynthia Osborne, associate professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin. 

"Children of lesbian mothers might have lived in many different family structures, and it is impossible to isolate the effects of living with a lesbian mother from experiencing divorce, remarriage or living with a single parent. Or it is quite possible that the effect derives entirely from the stigma attached to such relationships and to the legal prohibitions that prevent same-sex couples from entering and maintaining 'normal relationships'."

The goal of Regnerus's study - as you can easily guess - failed miserably. We won the right to marry, and everyone lived happily ever after.

Not quite. As seen by Knowles resurrecting Regnerus's work, those on his side of the spectrum are counting on short memories and immense engagement to win their argument, in spite of the lies they spin

But I am glad that anti-LGBTQ activists like Knowles are reaching back into the past. A lot of folks don't remember how common it was for the anti-LGBTQ industry to push flawed studies by discredited researchers against LGBTQ people.  And I have 20 years of "receipts to prove it. For example, one person they loved to cite was a discredited researcher named Paul Cameron who once claimed that gays stuff gerbils up their rectums. But more about him later. I have a feeling that grifters like Knowles will bring his name up for me.