In Defense of Mark Regnerus

In  The Chronicle of Higher Education , Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith  defends Mark Regnerus’s research on gay couples and child-rearing  against what Smith calls a progressive “witch hunt”:

Whoever said inquisitions and witch hunts were things of the past? A big one is going on now. The sociologist Mark Regnerus, at the University of Texas at Austin, is being smeared in the media and subjected to an inquiry by his university over allegations of scientific misconduct.

Regnerus’s offense? His article in the July 2012 issue of Social Science Research reported that adult children of parents who had same-sex romantic relationships, including same-sex couples as parents, have more emotional and social problems than do adult children of heterosexual parents with intact marriages. That’s it. Regnerus published ideologically unpopular research results on the contentious matter of same-sex families. And now he is being made to pay.

Smith goes on to defend the integrity of Regnerus’s study. Good for Smith; and good for  The Chronicle  for its open-mindedness.