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Slate’s Will Saletan Defends Flawed Parenting Study By Proving Its Irrelevance

By Zack Ford on Jun 14, 2012 at 2:21 pm

Slate's Will Saletan

Slate magazine invited Mark Regnerus to write a guest column about his biased, flawed paper about gay parenting, and Slate contributor Will Saletan humored the study without doing much to critique its obviously fraudulent methodology. Today, Saletan continued to defend the study, suggesting that there is a “liberal war on science” and that individuals should “trust science” and “embrace” this paper for what insights it supposedly offers about family stability. By completely disregarding concerns that LGBT groups expressed, Saletan duplicitiously demonstrated that he cares more about the political implications of the faulty paper than any high-minded regard for science that he might claim. And though he managed to finally point out some mistakes that Regnerus made, he still argued that the study had substance worth considering:

Shifting the conversation from orientation to stability doesn’t end the debate. But it does break the logjam. It frees us from dissent-silencing appeals to authority, such as the Bible or policy statements from the American Psychological Association. It opens social conservatives to the possibility of accepting gay marriage, since, as Regnerus points out, “whether some relationship arrangements are more systematically prone to disorganization than others” is an “empirically testable question.” By the same token, it challenges homosexuals to deliver. The Regnerus study shows how wretchedly unstable the households of most gay parents were in the years when gay sex and gay marriage were illegal. We have a chance now to do better. Don’t let the experiment fail.

That’s why we should take this study seriously. It tells both sides, including its author and its funders, difficult truths they need to hear. Family stability matters. And when same-sex couples are permitted, encouraged, and determined to provide that stability, kids do better. The left’s enlightenment about sexual orientation can be married to the right’s wisdom about family values. It won’t be easy. But it’s worth the effort.

Saletan comes off as overly eager to admit he’s wrong without admitting he’s wrong, and in the process he managed to prove just how irrelevant the study is. As he even admitted, only ten respondents indicated that they had lived consistently with same-sex parents for 13 or more of their first 18 years, so to suggest that this paper has anything legitimate to say about same-sex parenting is still a gross misreading. It absolutely requires buying into Regnerus’ conflation of “gay or lesbian parent” with “committed same-sex parents.” If Saletan really cares about “trusting science,” he can’t then frame his analysis around implications for gay parents when the study has none to offer.

Now, the observation that stability is good and instability is bad is fine, but to credit Regnerus’ paper with this conclusion is an overreach. If the purpose of this study was to identify the impact of broken families on youth, then why did Regnerus make it about gay and lesbian parents? In fact, he made the broadest generalization of the data possible in a specific attempt to draw conclusions about gay and lesbian parents, and it is those conclusions he has been discussing in every media appearance. Stability may be an “empirically testable question,” but it’s not the one Regnerus asked. Just because Saletan can contort the data to draw his own conclusions doesn’t make the study good science — it merely demonstrates his ability to spin.

Truth Wins Out’s Wayne Besen slammed Saletan today as a “conservative apologist posing as a liberal” with a “self-serving and dishonest writing style.” Saletan seems to believe he’s carved out some happy middle position that can appease both sides of the debate, but in doing so he’s managed to say nothing substantive at all.

Alyssa

A Quick Note On The Slate Layoffs

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Aug 25, 2011 at 8:38 am

My sense is that the reason so many people are so shocked and upset about the layoffs that claimed Jack Shafer, Tim Noah, Juliet Lapidos, and June Thomas’ jobs at Slate yesterday is not just that those journalists are beloved (and while I don’t agree with everything Lapidos wrote, I think her writing on friendships between men and women is significant and shouldn’t be forgotten). But I wonder if some of the shock comes from the fact that Noah and Shafer in particular were institutions, independent of Slate, and so the idea that Slate can fire them feels like a shock. There’s this idea in the age of new media that if you write a column or a blog under your own name, or if your brand is honed to a particular fineness, that you can never really be fired, you can just take your brand and your product somewhere else with you. It’s easy to think of Andrew Sullivan getting fired as a magazine editor, because it happened. It’s nigh-impossible to imagine someone firing Andrew and the apparatus he’d built up around him. I hope and believe that Shafer, Noah, Lapidos, and Thomas will end up fine, but their firings are significant not just for who they are, but for how it makes people feel about the power of brand and reputation in the age of Internet journalism.

Media

Ann Friedman vs Double X

By Matthew Yglesias on May 15, 2009 at 9:14 am

doublex_logo-beta-2-1

Ann Friedman has a thoughtful article called “The Trouble With Double X about the weirdness of Slate’s decision to launch a new all-woman adjunct site, Double X. I think this is the key point:

In the site’s introductory video, one of the editors, Hanna Rosin, says, “If you take something like Slate and you have it edited by three women, instead of the people it’s edited by, well that’s the kind of magazine that we want to turn out.” She goes on to say that the articles they publish “don’t have to be ‘women’s issues’” — she bends her fingers to make air-quotes — “in the way that people have always defined women’s issues. There can be a whole range of issues and you just put them through a slightly different lens.” Color me baffled. Wouldn’t Slate, edited by these insanely smart and accomplished women, just be … Slate? Couldn’t they apply that “slightly different lens” to articles on the primary site and market them to all readers?

Or to put it another way, if Slate’s managers think their publication’s content is being skewed in an undesirable way by a paucity of woman editors, then shouldn’t they just hire more women as editors? I think it’s definitely true that when you have many women in the editorial chain—as they currently do at TAP where Ann is Deputy Editor and Phoebe Connelly runs the website with Alexandra Gutierrez as her deputy—you wind up with a somewhat different product. At the same time, throughout my career I’ve been edited by women at various points and it’s not like the experience gave me cooties.

Historically, I think people who run media outlets have spent time dodging the problems inherent in the male-domination of most of the political media by pretending that gender is irrelevant to the work. They just try to hire “the best people” as editors and columnists and reporters” without regard to artificial quotas. I think what Rosin is admitting here is important, namely that that’s nonsense. It does matter whether something “like Slate” is “edited by three women, instead of the people it’s edited by.” But the solution to that isn’t to create gender-segregated media outlets, it’s to make a much more serious effort to incorporate women into the writing staff and editorial hierarchy of mainstream publications.

What Ann says here is interesting, too, but I actually can’t stand Esquire.

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