Tweet
And yet another person has risen to defend Mark Regnerus’ fraudulent study on gay parenting.
Karl D. Stephan, a professor of electrical engineering (you read that right) has published a piece in the Crisis magazine lambasting the critics of Regenrus’ study and claiming that Regnerus is being personally attacked because he supposedly dared to publish a politically incorrect study.
And to do so, he even invokes images of Nazi Germany and its persecution of Jewish people:
In the 1930s, many prominent scientists and engineers in Germany lost their reputations, their jobs, and some eventually their lives because of a non-scientific reason: they happened to be Jews, or outspoken Christians, or simply opposed to some political aim of the government. Everyone now agrees that this was a grievous violation of human rights, an early warning sign of the greater wrongs the German government would do in World War II. While that situation differs from the one Regnerus finds himself in by degree, does it differ in kind from what Jewish scientists suffered in Germany in the 1930s?
Regnerus has reached scientific conclusions that oppose the prevailing political winds. Though his punishment has come from activists rather than official government sources, it is no less politically motivated and no less unjust. Smith thinks the integrity of the social-science research process is threatened by the “public smearing and vigilante media attacks” mounted against Regnerus. If such attacks are successful, we have taken a long step away from scientific integrity and a long step toward the encouragement of a political atmosphere that is totalitarian in its effects.
It probably would have been better had Stefan had just addressed the reasons why folks are questioning Regnerus’ work.
He briefly talks about it in this mind-boggling paragraph in which he pretty much says he isn’t going to address the study’s errors:
Regnerus’s study, which he himself admits is not perfect, found otherwise. There were significant negative consequences of being raised by parents who were gay, according to the study. I am not going to address the controversial question of defining “gay” or how extensive the negative consequences were or how accurate and scientific the study was.
Stefan then attempts to make it seem that he is merely criticizing the process in which the peer-review of the study was attacked:
A journalist and self-described “minorities anti-defamation professional” whose pseudonym is Scott Rose wrote a letter to the University of Texas administration alleging that Regnerus’s paper falsified data. This is the most serious professional charge that anyone can level against a scientist, comparable to a malpractice charge against a doctor.
The first wrongdoing (as I pointed out in a letter published in the Austin American-Statesman) was for UT Austin to act on such complaints from a person who was not in a competent professional position to make such assessments. Scott Rose is not a sociologist. Rose has since published the full “evidence” he plans to present to UT Austin, and it consists of two kinds of arguments. One kind comprises disputes over methods and definitions that Regnerus used. If Rose had been selected as a reviewer of Regnerus’s paper, these arguments might have played a role at that point. But Rose, not being a qualified sociologist, has no professional standing to make them, and they must be assessed on their merits by other professional sociologists.
Scott Rose is a free-lance writer who has been calling out Regnerus’ study from day one. He is probably the one most singularly responsible for a lot of the negative attention it has been receiving.
However, in calling his name, Stefan makes an error. He makes it seem that Rose is the only person responsible for Regnerus’ study being criticized. This is not true.
In June, over 200 professors and therapists sent a letter to James Wright, editor of “Social Science Research,” the journal where Regnerus’s study was published, questioning the study and the process in which it was reviewed.
And it’s not as if Stefan isn’t aware of the letter. He even acknowledges it in an offhand way:
I have not even mentioned the press coverage with derogatory headlines, the letter signed by over a hundred sociologists objecting to Regnerus’s conclusions, and the politically motivated letter-mobbing of the journal’s editor, James Wright, which pressured him to request the review audit.
Furthermore, Stefan omits the other experts (pointed out by Equality Matters) who has condemned Regnerus’ study.
The grand irony of Stefan’s sad defense of Regnerus’ work is that he cites another defense of the study from sociologist Christian Smith. In his piece, Smith didn’t even address the study’s errors. Instead, just like Stefan, he attempted to make Regnerus a victim.
But at least he didn’t have the poor taste to imply that Regnerus’ critics were just like Nazis persecuting Jews.
What’s that saying about if you have to invoke Nazis to describe your opponents, that’s a sure sign that you have lost the argument?
10 Comments
“It probably would have been better had Stefan had just addressed the reasons why folks are questioning Regnerus’ work.”
He can’t. He has no grounds to rebut the criticisms, and he knows it. The only thing he has left is the victim card.
he has no credentials to be able to really defend the study…its that simple. Also I beleive he just wanted his name out there b/c he knew people wld respond to his post. It seems like the crazies are just using the GLBTQQ community to have their 15 minutes of fame. Thats sick!
It’s becoming increasingly clear that their continued comparisons of pro-equality forces to Nazis is an attempt to mask their own desire to finish what the Nazis did to us.
And note the fake Christian persecution cry. Aside from Jews, the only religious sect the Nazis actively persecuted were Jehovah’s Witnesses. And that had all to do with them being pacifists and refusing allegiance to the regime, so it was ultimately for political reasons too. If Christians kept quiet, none of them were persecuted just for being Christian.
In fact, the Nazis were afraid of the power the Christian churches still had. It was popular protest and vocal opposition by the Catholic church that forced them to officially stop their T4 euthanasia program. And that was as late as 1941! The Nazis knew that they couldn’t risk a confrontation with the church at the height of the war, so they didn’t retaliate.
Complicity in the Holocaust, Robert P Ericksen:
Apparently, Hitler was afraid of the Catholic Church becoming so enthusiastic that it would usurp the Nazi party.
The Nazis eventually planned to replace the established churches with a kind of mix between traditional Christianity and Nazi ideology organized by a Nazi-controlled state church. But they also knew that that would be unpopular with the people. And brutal dictatorship or not, they needed their support during the war. Any kind of radical change like that had to wait until later. So in the short term they curtailed some of the power the churches had, but otherwise made arrangements with them. The churches could have shown more opposition (see the T4 program as mentioned, showing that popular protest wasn’t impossible), but aside from genuine collaboration they were also too afraid to lose the power they still had.
Of course one of the reason the Catholic Church opposed the euthanasia program was that most of the victims were ordinary Germans and not Jews. As long as the victims were Jews many of them didn’t care as much
It’s interesting that the comments are running pretty heavily against the article and against the study.
I don’t know if there were any scientists who dared to say that the so-called scientific papers which showed that Jews (Jewish scientists included) were somehow less than human were wrong but, if they did and were punished for it, I wonder how that would sit with his weird understanding of history. I suppose that it would depend on if he agrees with it or not. He does seem to think that LGBT people are less than human so I’d think that if he was in the same position back then he’d again be the person saying that the discredited paper was being singled out because it wasn’t politically correct. By the way, doesn’t it seem like conservatives are the only ones using the phrase “politically correct” and it’s always when they are crying or whining about not getting their way?
I think its sad when ignorant people cite the historical record as proof but only show everyone that they slept through World History of the 20th Century.
Friggen idiots.
I am the Scott Rose mentioned in the article. While any person who graduated high school should be able to understand that in a test-group, control-group study, there must be a valid test-group control-group comparison, or the whole study is not valid, in all of my formal complaints against and/or involving Regnerus, I have cited experts. For example, in my scientific and scholarly misconduct allegations against Regnerus (http://tinyurl.com/chuakw8) I rely on expert sociologist Dr. Steven Nock, who, in a court affidavit, described the standards for doing exactly the kind of study Regnerus says he wanted to do; a large, random sample survey of children of gay parents. Regnerus violated every main rule that Dr. Nock described as indispensable. He even described examples, of exactly the kinds of errors Regnerus made, and says that those errors would make a study invalid. So nobody should be arguing with me; they should be explaining why they think Nock was wrong, if they want to defend Regnerus’s study as valid.