Doing It

Mark Regnerus gets props for being candid about his new study on parenting, but doesn’t seem to understand what he’s actually being candid about.

The study is another attempt to compare the effects on children of same-sex parents and opposite-sex parents — well, kind of.  Regnerus just asked adults if, as children, either of their parents had ever had a same-sex relationship, and if so, whether they’d lived with that parent during that period.  That approach obviously has some real problems, as John Corvino so aptly argues at TNR.

In describing the methodology of his research, Regnerus says, “I realize that one same-sex relationship does not a lesbian make, necessarily. But our research team was less concerned with the complicated politics of sexual identity than with same-sex behavior.”

I can’t think of a statement that more clearly reveals the chasm between the way the extreme right views sexual orientation and the way most everyone else does today.  Not knowing much about Regnerus, I have no idea what his political proclivities might be; all I can say is that his statement incorporates a view of homosexuality that is widely accepted only among the political and religious right today.

No one would argue that heterosexuality is synonymous with sexual behavior — or at least no one would who expected to be taken seriously.  Sexual orientation — gay or straight — involves sexual behavior, but also an enormous spectrum of other factors, psychological, emotional, relational and both public and private.  I doubt many heterosexual couples would stand for having their sexual behavior isolated and then used as the measure against their parenting skills.

But Regnerus is happy to do that for homosexuals.  He thinks it will actually be helpful to society to compare people who have engaged in homosexual behavior and had some experience parenting (for as little as four months), with heterosexual parents who have married and devoted a lifetime to raising children.

That is a comparison that is simply untenable.  When many of the children he surveyed were growing up, of course, homosexuality was more widely stigmatized as sexual behavior — or, more accurately, sexual misbehavior, since it could also be criminalized.  That view of homosexuality as conduct rather than as something more integrated into a human character is something most of the culture has moved on from.  But the right continues its obsessive focus on sex, to the exclusion of anything else.  And Regnerus places that view of homosexuality at the very heart of his study.

In addition, Regnerus makes the same mistake that Dr. Robert Spitzer made in his early study of homosexuality, and has both regretted and apologized for: taking the word of people about their experiences, without any further delving.

It would be good to hear Regnerus respond to both of these criticisms.  I don’t think either one has a responsible answer.  Whatever his study shows, it does not answer the question that the right poses: whether there is any scientific proof that the children of stable homosexual couples do any better or worse than the children of stable heterosexual couples.

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