Mark Regnerus

Mark Regnerus’ parenting paper, with its faulty negative claims about gay parenting, has been roundly criticized by LGBT groups and mainstream psychological organizations and widely praised by anti-gay groups, in particular the National Organization for Marriage. Regnerus’ paper was published simultaneously in Social Science Research with a brief by professor Loren Marks critiquing the American Psychological Association’s support of same-sex parenting.

Scott Rose at The New Civil Rights Movement is building a compelling case that the publication of these two papers was coordinated with anti-gay groups who would capitalize on its political implications. Here are some of the clues Rose has discovered:

• Regnerus and Marks published their pieces together, but Marks cited Regnerus’ paper, so he clearly had foreknowledge of its conclusions. This suggests it is likely they intentionally published simultaneously as a “one-two election year punch.”
• Marks was originally called to testify in favor of Proposition 8, but admitted in deposition that he only had read parts of the studies from which he drew conclusions and had considered no research on gay and lesbian parents. His present research, published just two years later, attempts to make the same claims.
• Marks also made his paper available for the House Republican legal team defending the Defense of Marriage Act long before it was published in a peer-reviewed journal.
• There are multiple obvious ties between NOM co-founder Robert George, the Witherspoon Institute (which funded Regnerus’ research), Baylor Institute for Studies of Religion (which is defending the research), National Review (where NOM’s Maggie Gallagher frequently writes and where she has promoted the paper), and Mark Regnerus himself, suggesting particularly convenient collusion for spinning the political implications of the paper’s publication.

Anti-gay organizations have been quite intentional about promoting the paper’s fraudulent results since its publication, ignoring not only 30 years of past precedent but conflicting research that has been published in the interim. The number of convenient intersections allowing them to do so are becoming too plentiful to ignore. Fortunately, the study’s conclusions remain unfounded in the data and can continue to be disregarded as such.

Many do not realize that the bell-ringing Salvation Army is actually a Christian church organization with many conservative tenets and a military-style structure. Last week, an Australian Salvation Army official, Major Andrew Craibe, addressed questions about the organization’s anti-gay policies in a radio interview, acknowledging multiple times that the Bible calls for LGBT people to be put to death if they do not “come to know salvation” (i.e. chastity).

Hours after Truth Wins Out first reported the interview, the Salvation Army Australia issued an apology for Craibe’s “miscommunication,” explaining that the Bible refers not to “physical death” but to “spiritual death”:

The Scripture in question, viewed in its broader context, is not referring to physical death, nor is it specifically targeted at homosexual behaviour. The author is arguing that no human being is without sin, all sin leads to spiritual death (separation from God), and all people therefore need a Saviour. [...]

The Salvation Army sincerely apologises to all members of the GLBT community and to all our clients, employees, volunteers and those who are part of our faith communities for the offence caused by this miscommunication.[...]

We pledge to continue to offer services to all Australians and to treat each person with dignity, respect and non-discrimination.

The statement does not fully address the Salvation Army’s on-going anti-LGBT policies. The controversy in Australia has erupted after openly gay pop star Darren Hayes (formerly of Savage Garden) called for a boycott because of the group’s antagonistic beliefs on sexuality. LGBT blogger Bil Browning did the same this past year in the U.S., citing the organization’s anti-gay lobbying efforts and its expectation that gay people who benefit from its charity be celibate.

On Friday, the Washington Blade reported that the National Council of La Raza, the country’s largest Latino civil rights organization, has unanimously endorsed marriage equality. The resolution is not yet public, as the organization plans to announce it at its convention next week, but NCLR has confirmed that the vote took place June 9, less than a month after the NAACP made a similar endorsement. Danny Ortega, former NCLR Board Chair whose term ended just after the vote, said that though some people had some questions during the discussion, the decision was ultimately quite easy:

ORTEGA: We had a discussion about this and clearly some people had more questions than others, but at the end of the discussion it was unanimous. We thought it was not only the right thing to do, but consistent with our values as an organization.

NCLR joins The Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund as well as the Texas chapter of the League of United Latin American Citizens, both of which have also endorsed marriage equality recently.

These groups’ statements effectively debunk the National Organization for Marriage’s proposed tactic of race-baiting Latino voters to oppose marriage equality. According to confidential memos released earlier this year, NOM wanted to convince young Latinos that to support the freedom to marry was to somehow acculturate to white values, where as staying opposed could represent a “badge of youth rebellion to conformist assimilation to the bad side of ‘Anglo’ culture.” NCLR condemned NOM’s “diabolical plan” for its intolerant “cravenness.”