Academics intending to investigate the social effects of same-sex unions may think twice after the ordeal of Professor Regnerus

The Regnerus affair may have a chilling impact on academic freedom

By William Oddie on Friday, 19 October 2012

 

Dr William Oddie is a leading English Catholic writer and broadcaster. He edited The Catholic Herald from 1998 to 2004 and is the author of The Roman Option and Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy.

Professor Mark Regnerus (Courtesy of Markregnerus.com)

I want to be clear, at the outset, that this is not yet another blog about Catholic teaching on the morality of homosexuality, nor is it (except indirectly) one more defence of the traditional family. It’s partly (but again indirectly) about the social effects of treating homosexual unions as though they were equivalent to marriage based on the union of one man and one woman: but again, it’s not about the morality or theology of active homosexuality.
It’s about the politics of it: it’s about the way in which the gay lobby operates. Just as most secularists are very hesitant to have a go at Islam, when they don’t think twice about mounting an attack on Christianity, so I detect a growing reluctance among Christians to risk getting on the wrong side of the gay lobby. The gay lobby doesn’t actually go in for assassination: you may not get shot or blown up: but the result can be pretty unpleasant all the same. And there is mounting evidence that this phenomenon is already having a clear effect on academic freedom.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the research of Professor Mark Regnerus of the University of Texas, who after a very large-scale survey found (publishing his findings, after the usual process of peer review, in the widely respected journal Social Science Research) that “children raised by homosexual parents are more likely than those raised by married heterosexual parents to suffer from poor impulse control, depression and suicidal thoughts” and that “They are also more likely to require more mental health therapy; identify themselves as homosexual; choose cohabitation; be unfaithful to partners; contract sexually transmitted diseases; be sexually molested; have lower income levels; drink to get drunk; and smoke tobacco and marijuana.”
I don’t want, here, to talk about these findings (I have already done that), rather I want to home in on the surrounding circumstances of their publication, for they reveal much about the ruthlessness of the gay lobby, and about the way it uses intimidation to prevent too many people with Professor Regnerus’s inclination to tell what he believes to be the truth on this subject from raising their heads above the parapet.
As for why this is a subject for a Catholic blog: Professor Regnerus is himself a Catholic and that is one of the reasons for his attack proffered by the gay blogger Scott Rose, who then made a complaint to his employers of academic misconduct, a complaint which was then promptly and thoroughly investigated by Texas University, who in the end found that Professor Regnerus had conducted his research with complete integrity. But there is a real question about that: why should a respectable university have jumped to it quite so quickly at the behest of an activist individual of this type, a person with no more status or authority than his own blog and his position in the gay activist world? The answer is that he had so successfully stirred up such vitriolic opposition to Professor Regnerus’s findings in the liberal media, that the university was actually frightened of him. So when he said “jump”, the university authorities at Austin, in the great state of Texas, jumped.
What Mark Regnerus was then put through is disquieting. Rose accused Regnerus of scientific misconduct in two letters, first charging him with deviating from “ethical standards” and later accusing him of “possible falsification” of his research. Rose claimed the study was compromised because it was funded by the conservative Witherspoon Institute and also because professor Regnerus is a Catholic, and therefore incapable of impartiality on such a subject (unlike himself, presumably).
The inquiry into their colleague’s integrity was conducted by a four-member “advisory panel” composed of senior faculty members, who (for all the world like a police force investigating fraud or paedophile offences) actually seized Regnerus’s computers and 42,000 emails. Once the inquiry was complete, the university commissioned a former associate director of the Office of Research Integrity in the US Department of Health and Human Services, to review the inquiry, which he found was “consistent with federal regulatory requirements of inquiries into research misconduct”.
So all’s well that ends well? Well, not quite. For there has now been established a precedent, which in the future those conducting academic research might well find intimidating. The moral seems to be, not so much that if you tell the truth and proceed with integrity all will be well but that if you want to be sure of avoiding that kind of gruelling ordeal, make sure you don’t choose a topic which might get you on the wrong side of the gay lobby: best just to steer clear of any such subject.
There is also the question of what a Catholic academic can now write about and research into. Earlier this week, there appeared an article in the New York Times, looking back on the Regnerus affair, tellingly entitled “Sociologist’s Paper Raises Questions on Role of Faith in Scholarship”.
“Because Dr Regnerus would not be interviewed,” says the article’s author, Mark Oppenheimer, “it is impossible to know his latest views about the relationship between his faith and research. But we can still ask if, in principle, belief in the divinity of Jesus could affect one’s social science. Put another way: “is there a Christian way to crunch numbers?”

“The answer, in my personal opinion, is no,” said Mark Chaves, a sociologist of religion at Duke Divinity School. But, he added, religious concerns “can very profoundly shape the kinds of questions we ask, and what we’re interested in, what we think is important and so on”. So while “in the narrowest sense it doesn’t affect his computations”, Dr Regnerus’s Christian faith may have drawn him to questions about same-sex relationships and family structure.
And a religious worldview, like any worldview, can dispose a researcher toward certain mistakes in thinking. Somebody critical of same-sex relationships may be more likely to group all such relationships together, as Dr Regnerus did.

Why that is a “mistake in thinking” is not explained: after all “grouping” relationships, or anything else, together is the necessary preliminary to discovering whether or not meaningful generalisations about them can be made.
“Dr Regnerus,” says Oppenheimer, “was a proud Christian witness, once upon a time. But these days he won’t discuss his faith, even with a Christian magazine. Two weeks ago, Christianity Today ran a lengthy interview with Dr Regnerus in which he said nothing about his religious beliefs. ‘I just didn’t think it was a profitable line of inquiry,’ Dr Regnerus said, in the one answer he would e-mail me. ‘I still don’t – sorry.’”
Can anyone blame him, after all he has been through? It is very sad – and disquieting – all the same.