Free Republic

SCIENCEDIRECT.COM A mid-2000’s study linking anti-gay prejudice to shorter lifespans for lesbians, gays, and bisexual individuals has been retracted on grounds that it was an “erroneous” finding.The study “Structural stigma and all-cause mortality in sexual minority populations” was conducted by researchers from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and was published by the peer-reviewed academic journal Social Science & Medicine in February 2014.The study purported to have found that lesbian, gay, and bisexual people who live in communities with high levels of anti-gay sentiment tend to die earlier than lesbians, gays and bisexuals who live in communities that are...

<p>In what some (the author) likely consider a groundbreaking assertion, University of Texas sociology professor Mark Regnerus is warning women that no one buys the cow when it gives the milk away for free.</p> <p>“Girls are easier to mislead than guys just by lying or just not really caring. If you know what girls want, then you know you should not give that to them until the proper time. If you do that strategically, then you can really have anything you want…whether it’s a relationship, sex, or whatever. You have the control.”</p>

Social science was never going to save marriage’s male-female infrastructure. What it can do—if the narrative the data reveals isn’t manipulated—is reveal what is really going on.Now that the Supreme Court’s oral arguments are behind us, and the justices have already privately cast their votes about the future (and the history) of marriage, perhaps it’s possible that the social science of marriage, sexuality, and child outcomes can catch its breath. Better yet, perhaps it can operate without the pressure-cooker of politically acceptable narratives. But after three years, and two separate inquisitions by my own university, I’ve come to conclude that...

A new academic study based on the Canadian census suggests that a married mom and dad matter for children. Children of same-sex coupled households do not fare as well. There is a new and significant piece of evidence in the social science debate about gay parenting and the unique contributions that mothers and fathers make to their children’s flourishing. A study published last week in the journal Review of the Economics of the Household—analyzing data from a very large, population-based sample—reveals that the children of gay and lesbian couples are only about 65 percent as likely to have graduated...

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...

‘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...